Introduction

Wedged between the Indian and Pacific oceans, Australia is the only continent occupied entirely by a single country. It is an island continent and, like the island continent of Antarctica, it is located entirely in the Southern Hemisphere. Tasmania, a much smaller island off the southeast coast of Australia, is also considered to be a part of the continent. Australia’s nearest neighbors are the countries of Indonesia and East Timor to the northwest; Papua New Guinea, a short distance across the Torres Strait to the north; and New Zealand, more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to the southeast. Area 2,969,976 square miles (7,692,202 square kilometers). Population (2017 est.) 23,758,101.

Australia is sometimes called “the land down under” because it lies in the Southern Hemisphere almost halfway around the world from Great Britain, which was its mother country in the colonial era. Australia’s southern coasts are washed by the cold Southern, or Antarctic, Ocean. Australia’s northern coasts are separated from the archipelagoes of Southeast Asia by warm, shallow tropical seas.

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Australia is the flattest, most arid, and least populated of the inhabited continents. Although it is not a large continent, it is the world’s sixth largest country, after Russia, Canada, China, the United States, and Brazil. Australia’s land area is 32 times that of the United Kingdom and more than twice that of India. Yet only some 23 million people inhabit this vast area. Australia’s population is less than that of the U.S. state of Texas and only about one-third that of the United Kingdom.

A coastline of more than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) encircles the mainland. Mainland Australia stretches more than 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from east to west. The northernmost point on mainland Australia is Cape York, Queensland, at 10°41′ N. The southernmost point is South Point, on Wilsons Promontory, Victoria, at 39°8′ S. The latitudinal (north-south) distance between the two points is about 1,975 miles (3,180 kilometers). Tasmania’s farthest coast is another 310 miles (500 kilometers) to the south. The state of Tasmania also has jurisdiction over numerous small islands. The most distant of those islands is Macquarie Island, about 915 miles (1,470 kilometers) southeast of the mainland. Because of its immense size, Australia has three standard time zones. The eastern states are 10 hours ahead of Greenwich (London) time.

Politically, Australia may be variously described as an independent Western democracy, a liberal welfare state, a federal parliamentary democracy, or a constitutional monarchy. The United Kingdom’s monarch remains the head of state, though that is a largely ceremonial post.

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Australia contains six states: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, and Tasmania. The country also includes two internal territories: the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, which contains Canberra, the country’s capital. In addition, Australia administers six external territories: Norfolk Island, Coral Sea Islands, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, Ashmore and Cartier Islands, and Heard Island and McDonald Islands. Australia claims the right to administer a large portion of Antarctica, called the Australian Antarctic Territory. Many other countries also claim slices of Antarctica. According to the Antarctic Treaty system to which Australia is a signatory, all such claims are put aside in the interest of peace, and Antarctica is under international management.

Also according to international treaty, Australia has an exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The zone extends as much as 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) beyond the coastal baseline of both the mainland and its islands (which number about 12,000). The EEZ gives Australia jurisdiction over the fishing, mining, and exploration of some 3,860,000 square miles (10,000,000 square kilometers) of ocean—a maritime zone significantly larger than the land area of the country.

Australia is famous for its vast sparsely settled areas called the Outback, with sweeping panoramas of desert, grassland, and rock formations. This fame is so strong that the stereotype of a white Australian man is that of a cowboylike loner exploring the Outback, much like Paul Hogan’s title character in the Crocodile Dundee film series. Many Europeans and Americans may likewise imagine Australia’s white women as rustic homesteaders on Outback sheep stations who scold dusty children while hanging linens out to dry under a big sky. Meanwhile, stereotypes of Aboriginal peoples might picture them as illiterate, destitute, and forlorn, lounging perpetually beneath baobab and scrub trees, with no notion of the wider world around them. Although a small percentage of Australians may resemble those stereotypes, most do not. The vast majority of Australians of all ancestries live technologically sophisticated urbanized lives.

In recent decades, more-progressive Australian images have begun to replace the older stereotypes. These include, for instance, the majestic Sydney Opera House against the backdrop of a thriving port city, multiethnic commuters on city streets, and Aboriginal athletes at the Olympics. About 90 percent of Australians live in cities and towns—not farms or Outback stations. Many seldom venture more than a dozen miles beyond the coastline, despite the enormous expanses of continental land beyond. Of Australia’s approximately 23 million inhabitants, nearly one-fourth were born elsewhere. About 3 percent are of Indigenous—Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander—descent. Australia is not a utopia, however. Poverty, social inequality, and other social problems remain serious obstacles for many citizens and residents, particularly where racism and discrimination complicate people’s lives.

Australia has a diverse, technologically advanced economy. It has an expanding service sector, highly productive industries, and abundant mineral resources. The country leads the world in wool production and coal and iron-ore export. Its copper and bauxite mines also make significant contributions to world production. Australia enjoys one of the world’s highest standards of living.

Land and Climate

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Australia’s main physical characteristics are its isolation from other continents, its low relief, and the aridity (dryness) of much of its land. The continent’s low relief is the result of millions of years of erosion by wind, rain, and sun.

About the northern third of Australia lies in the tropics, north of the Tropic of Capricorn. The southern two-thirds of the country are in subtropical and middle latitudes. Deserts and semiarid landscapes cover most of the continent’s western and central portions. The best-watered areas are the eastern coasts of the mainland and the slopes of Tasmania. Australia has few mountain ranges of note, making it the lowest and flattest of the continents. The few peaks that exceed 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) would be considered foothills within other mountain ranges of the world. Yet they provide striking scenery and are vital, in many cases, to the rainfall received on the continent.

Geology

Most of the rocks underlying Australia’s landforms are very old. The continent’s Precambrian rocks date from about 3.7 billion years ago. Australian fossils are among the oldest on Earth. They reveal some algae and soft-bodied invertebrates dating from 3 billion years ago in the rocks of the western Outback. Over the subsequent billions of years, the continental plates have been moving slowly, combining in some places and separating in others. But during the last 500 million years much of western Australia has remained intact.

Fossils and other evidence indicate that Australia was once joined to South America, Africa, India, and Antarctica to form the supercontinent called Gondwana. This great landmass began to split and drift apart more than 200 million years ago. However, Australia was not completely separate from other landmasses such as Antarctica until about 35 million years ago. The plate carrying Australia is still drifting northeastward by about 2.75 inches (7 centimeters) per year owing to seafloor spreading in the southeast Indian Ocean. As a result, it is slowly colliding with the northwestward-moving Pacific Plate.

Topographic Regions

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Australia can be divided into three major topographic, or landform, areas. They are the Western Plateau, the Central Lowlands, and the Eastern Highlands (or Great Dividing Range).

The Western Plateau, or Western Shield, is a vast irregular tableland covering more than half of the country. It includes Australia’s largest deserts. The somewhat contiguous expanses of the Great Sandy, Gibson, Great Victoria, Tanami, and Simpson deserts are sometimes collectively referred to as the Great Australian Desert. Sun-blasted dune fields cover most of their parched surfaces. These deserts average only 1,000 to 1,800 feet (300 to 550 meters) in elevation. They often resemble the wide-open landscape of the American West.

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The highlands of the Western Plateau include the MacDonnell Ranges in central Australia, the Darling Range near the southwestern coast, and the Kimberley plateau region in the northwest. Some individual mountains also rise above the landscape. The most famous of these peaks, Uluru/Ayers Rock, was not deposited or raised independently above the plain. Instead, it has withstood millions of years of erosion that have slowly scraped away the surrounding area following periods of faulting and uplift of rock. Far to the south, the Nullarbor (meaning “no trees”) Plain is an uplifted limestone plain. It forms part of the curving coastline on the Great Australian Bight, an extension of the Indian and Antarctic oceans.

The Central Lowlands are also called the Interior Lowland Basins. Much of this region is flat. It stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from the swampy, tropical Gulf of Carpentaria in the north to the Spencer Gulf, near Adelaide, in the south. The irregular eastern side of the Central Lowlands gradually yields to foothills such as the Drummond and Chesterton ranges and peaks such as Mount Booroondarra.

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Parts of the Central Lowlands drain sluggishly into the Indian Ocean along the Murray River and its tributaries, including the Darling River. Several rivers drain into the region’s interior. The water evaporates or seeps into the ground. As a result, there are many salt “lakes” that are dry much of the time, including Lakes Eyre, Torrens, Frome, and Gairdner. Underlying these lowlands is the Great Artesian Basin, the most extensive supply of underground freshwater in the world. Farmers pump well water from the basin. They use the water to sustain grazing animals and irrigated crops on the semiarid grasslands and scrublands above.

The Eastern Highlands, or Great Dividing Range, is a region of high plains, ridges, mountain ranges, and basins. It extends along the coast for 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers), from the Cape York Peninsula of Queensland to Bass Strait on the Victoria coast. In some locations the mountains rise directly from the sea in spectacular cliffs. Elsewhere, as at Sydney, a short strip of coastal hills and lowlands separates the highlands from the Pacific. The mountainous southern section of the region is known as the Australian Alps. There, Mount Kosciuszko rises to 7,310 feet (2,228 meters), the continent’s highest point.

The mountains of the Eastern Highlands are crucial to the climate of eastern Australia. The easterly winds striking the continent are forced up their slopes, where the winds cool and produce rain. Thick forests cover much of the highlands.

The southern coasts are typically drowned river valleys, or estuaries, where rising sea levels followed the melting of polar ice. Vistas of cliffed headlands and sandy beaches alternate. Huge sea stacks, or jagged rocks, called the Twelve Apostles line the Victoria coast near Port Campbell.

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Most of Australia’s rivers flow only seasonally or intermittently. Permanent streams are found mainly in the eastern and southwestern regions of the mainland and in Tasmania. However, the Murray River, the continent’s main permanent river, is in the southeast. This snow-fed river forms most of the boundary between New South Wales and Victoria before emptying into the Indian Ocean.

Australia has many remarkable caves. Among them are the Jenolan Caves in New South Wales, known for their intricate dripstone. Mammoth Cave in Western Australia is famous for its fossils. Koonalda Cave lies 250 feet (75 meters) below the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia. It contains 20,000-year-old Aboriginal rock paintings.

Great Barrier Reef

The world’s most extensive array of coral reefs, shoals, and islets is the Great Barrier Reef. It lies in the Pacific Ocean off the Queensland coast. The Great Barrier Reef extends for more than 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers). It covers an area of some 135,000 square miles (350,000 square kilometers). The reef has formed over millions of years—and is still forming—from the skeletons of undersea organisms “cemented” together by algae and bryozoans, or moss animals. The reef’s pools, lagoons, and grottoes display the most complex diversity of marine life in the world. They teem with thousands of sponge and coral species, as well as anemones, marine worms, prawns, crabs, fishes, and birds. The destructive crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) has eaten much of the living coral near Cairns since the mid-1900s.

Human Impact on the Environment

Humans—both Aboriginal peoples and European settlers—have changed Australia’s landscape and environment in many ways. Long before the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginal peoples burned parts of the bush to draw out animals for hunting and to encourage plant regrowth. This practice, called firestick farming, surely altered natural patterns on the continent. In general, however, Aboriginal peoples used the land and its resources in a sustainable way.

After Europeans began to settle in Australia in the late 1700s, the human impact on the environment greatly increased. The practice of clearing land for agricultural uses and human settlement has resulted in the loss of much of Australia’s original forests and grasslands. It has made the land more susceptible to soil erosion and desertification. These processes have also been encouraged by the overgrazing of livestock, which has altered huge areas of native grassland. Another agricultural practice with a harmful environmental impact is the use of chemical fertilizers on croplands. Nutrients from the fertilizers have polluted groundwater, rivers, and coastal waters. Pesticides have been a source of environmental pollution as well.

One of the biggest threats to biodiversity in Australia has been the introduction of non-native plants and animals. This practice began with the arrival of the first European colonists in the late 1700s and continues today. Invasive species have greatly altered ecosystems, competing with native species for food, shelter, and other resources and causing some to go extinct. (See also “Extinct and nonnative animals” below.)

Urbanization and industrial development have also had a great impact on the environment. The growth of cities along the coast has eliminated the habitats of some plants and animals, thereby threatening biodiversity. Booming urban populations have increased demand for energy and water and have created more waste and pollution. The burning of fossil fuels for energy, transportation, and industry has caused air pollution and contributed to global warming (see “Climate” below). In recent years conservation efforts have helped reduce the environmental impact of urbanization even as populations have grown. The air and water quality in Australian cities is generally good.

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Water pollution, global warming, and coastal development are among several threats to the health of the Great Barrier Reef. Rising water temperatures, which are associated with global warming, are believed to be the main cause of coral bleaching. In this process, coral lose the algae that normally live in their tissues, which can kill the coral within weeks if conditions do not improve. Coral bleaching has already devastated large sections of the reef.

Australia saw the rise of environmentalism as a political movement in the 1960s. The world’s first “green party”—a political party dedicated to environmental causes—was founded in the state of Tasmania in 1972. The United Tasmania Group was created by protest groups opposed to the construction of a dam that was flooding Lake Pedder in southwestern Tasmania. The state-run Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC) was building the dam as part of a plan to develop the remote region as a source of electric power. Opponents were not able to stop the hydroelectric scheme, and the lake was flooded. Nevertheless, they built an organization that continued to advocate for environmental causes.

The movement was put to the test in the late 1970s when the Tasmanian government sought to build another dam, this time on the Franklin River. Environmentalists mobilized against the project, and in 1982–83 more than 1,200 protesters were arrested in a massive act of civil disobedience. The Franklin River controversy became a national political issue. In 1983 the federal government stepped in. The newly elected Labor government led by Bob Hawke introduced regulations that forbade the HEC from building the dam on the Franklin, which had recently been named a UNESCO World Heritage site. The HEC defied the regulations and continued work on the dam until a High Court decision finally stopped the project in July 1983.

Another high-profile environmental struggle in Australia has surrounded uranium mining in the Northern Territory. Kakadu National Park contains uranium deposits that mining companies have sought for decades to extract. Both environmental groups and the Mirarr people, the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land, have opposed mining in and near the park. In 1998 more than 5,000 protesters staged a blockade at the site of the proposed Jabiluka mine. A landmark agreement signed in 2004 required the mining company to put the ore it had extracted back into the ground. It also stated that mining at Jabiluka could resume only with written consent of the Mirarr.

Climate

Australia has a wide range of tropical and midlatitude climates. However, it lacks the high mountain ranges that diversify the weather and climate patterns on other continents. It is generally quite hot and dry. Australia receives less precipitation than any other continent except Antarctica with an annual average precipitation of only 16.5 inches (42 centimeters). Half of the continent receives less than 12 inches (30 centimeters) per year.

High pressure cells move from west to east across the continent, bringing clear skies and almost no rain. Much of western and west-central Australia is classified as subtropical desert, receiving limited, erratic rainfall. Many of these desert areas are dry except for a few days each year. On those days rainfall reaches the areas as an extension of a massive tropical storm that strikes the Australian coast hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Partly encircling these deserts, particularly in central Australia, are vast regions of semiarid midlatitude steppe. The steppe is dotted with drought-resistant grasses and scrub vegetation.

Temperatures in the deserts of western and west-central Australia range from average highs of about 100 °F (37.8 °C) in January to average lows of about 40 °F (4.5 °C) in July. Marble Bar, Western Australia, set the heat-wave record by surpassing 100 °F on 160 consecutive days in 1923–24. In contrast, the southwestern coast at Perth has a Mediterranean climate. It has a cool, moist winter (June to September) and a warm, dry summer (December to March). Perth and its seaside suburb Fremantle also enjoy one of the world’s most persistent sea breezes, nicknamed the Fremantle Doctor.

Along the Gulf of Carpentaria and other areas of the north, tropical savanna predominates. Cairns in the northeast experiences tropical monsoon conditions, with a wet summer and a dry winter. Humid easterlies blow off the Pacific Ocean, making the coastal rainforests of Tully, Queensland, the wettest place in Australia. They receive an average of 159 inches (405 centimeters) of precipitation per year. The humid winds are sometimes augmented by destructive tropical cyclones (also called hurricanes or typhoons). The cyclones sweep in from the sun-drenched Coral Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria. One of the worst such storms to hit Australia almost completely destroyed the port city of Darwin, Northern Territory, on December 25, 1974. Another such cyclone caused extensive damage to buildings and plantations on the northeast coast of Queensland in and around Innisfail on March 20, 2006.

Average temperatures in the north hover around 84 °F (29 °C) in summer and 75 °F (24 °C) in winter. Most residents there endure heat discomfort for over 150 days a year. Cloncurry, Queensland, claims the highest temperature ever recorded in the country, 127.6 °F (53.1 °C) in 1889.

Australia’s eastern and southern coasts, including Tasmania, are dominated by midlatitude climates such as Mediterranean, humid subtropical, and coastal maritime climates. They experience lesser temperature ranges and more-reliable rainfall. Precipitation in these areas averages 40 to 60 inches (100 to 150 centimeters) each year. Although most of the precipitation comes from rain, snow covers many of the eastern mountains in the winter. Only at these higher elevations do winter temperatures compare with those commonly experienced in North America and northern Europe. In low-lying areas summer temperatures average about 64 °F (18 °C), compared with winter temperatures of about 50 °F (10 °C).

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Periodic droughts increase the risk of disastrous bushfires (forest fires), such as the deadly fires of 1983 and 2009. Australia’s most costly hailstorm hit Sydney in 1999 and produced tennis ball-sized hailstones. Flash floods can also cause severe damage. Tornadoes strike Australia, though neither as often nor with as much fury as in the United States. In addition, the vast distances between Australian towns minimize the chances that any population center will be struck by a tornado. Destructive tornadoes did, however, hit the suburbs of Melbourne in 1918 and of Brisbane in 1973.

Southern Australia extends into the belt of westerly winds that encircle Earth at about 40° S latitude: the “roaring forties.” These winds bring cloudy cold fronts twice weekly to Tasmania and Victoria during the winter, when rainfall is concentrated. Although the southeast is known for its mild conditions, in 1994 Australia’s lowest temperature, −9.4 °F (−23 °C), was recorded at Charlotte Pass, near Mount Kosciuszko.

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Australia’s worst droughts—including those of 1982–83, 1991–95, and 2002–03—are generally attributed to a climate phenomenon called El Niño. El Niño usually occurs two or three times every decade. It is accompanied by a shift in water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. As a result, rainfall due in eastern Australia fails to arrive, leaving the area parched. Contrasting to El Niño is the La Niña effect, which periodically brings flooding even to normally dry parts of Australia. Unusually heavy rainfall due in part to La Niña caused record flooding in Queensland in 2010–11.

Climate does change. About 30,000 years ago, the continent was much wetter and greener, providing grazing land and forests for giant mammals and other animals. But between 22,000 and 18,000 years ago, the climate was drier and colder. Glaciers covered parts of the highlands, yet the desert core was enlarged. Sand dunes covered parts of Victoria and Tasmania. The last Ice Age ended only 10,000 years ago.

Scientific evidence has shown that average world temperatures are between 1 and 2 °F (0.7 °C) warmer today than in the year 1900. This warming trend is closely linked to Earth’s life-supporting greenhouse effect. Animals, plants, wildfires, and volcanic eruptions produce greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) that are normally in balance in the atmosphere. Since the 1800s, humans have produced increasingly large amounts of greenhouse gases—for example, in the smoke pouring out of coal- and oil-burning factories, automobiles, and power generators.

Several of the world’s industrial and political leaders have resisted calls to limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. However, many Australians are concerned that rapid global warming may ruin agriculture, generate stronger tropical storms and hurricanes, and increase the damage caused by El Niño events. They are also concerned that global warming may gradually raise sea levels, thereby flooding coastal cities and contributing to the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. Australians have improved their air quality by enforcing environmental laws, building fuel-efficient cars, and beginning to use alternative fuels.

Many people in Australia, a country of beachgoers and outdoor enthusiasts, have also been concerned about the thinning of Earth’s protective ozone layer over Antarctica. The ozone layer shields humans from harmful ultraviolet radiation that can cause sunburn and skin cancer. Fortunately, environmental laws around the world have reduced the production of ozone-destroying chemicals in recent decades.

Plants and Animals

As a result of millions of years of isolation from Asia, Australia has many plant and animal species that are found nowhere else in the world. Among them are myriad fish and bird species and more than four-fifths of Australia’s flowering plants, mammals, reptiles, and frogs.

Plant Life

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Australia has tens of thousands of plant species. Although the plants are more varied and abundant in the wetter highlands and coastal areas, desert areas also have a surprising array of vegetation. Of Australia’s 20,000 species of vascular plants, some 17,000 are unique to the continent. Only about 5 percent of Australia’s land is forested.

Ron Dorman—Bruce Coleman Inc.

The highlands and hills of eastern Australia have forests of eucalyptus as well as of acacia, or wattles. Such forests also populate a wide, curving band of territory around parts of the Outback. Australia is home to several hundred species of eucalyptus trees, which are often called eucalypts or gums. Many kinds are named after their bark type, such as stringybark, ironbark, bloodwood, and smoothbark, which are gums that shed their outer bark annually. The most widespread is the river red gum. The world’s tallest flowering plant is a southern eucalyptus, the giant gum or mountain ash of Victoria. It can grow taller than 300 feet (90 meters)—a size comparable to that of some California redwoods. White cypress pines also grow in some eucalyptus forests. These trees can grow in infertile soils and can withstand drought, fire, and termites.

Acacia, or wattles, are trees of the genus Acacia of the pea family. They advance beyond the last eucalyptus trees into the desert. Hundreds of acacia species are native to Australia, but vast regions of the Outback are dominated by just a few, including the species known as golden wattle, brigalow, mulga, and gidgee. The mulga is a scrub tree that grows on thousands of square miles of western and central Australia. The phrase “out in the mulga” is slang for the most distant Outback areas. Aboriginal peoples traditionally used mulga wood for spear blades and shields and as a slow-burning fuel for cooking fires. The golden wattle is the floral symbol of Australia and is celebrated on National Wattle Day each year on September 1.

Casuarina trees occupy semiarid spaces between eucalyptus and acacia woodlands. Scrub trees such as mallee, saltbush, and bluebush are also common there. Banksia and plants of the genus Grevillea dominate in isolated areas. Mallees are woody eucalyptus shrubs and trees that survive by growing multiple stems (lignotubers) from a common root. However, farmers and stock workers have removed much mallee vegetation and replaced it with non-native grasses and grains. Native hummock grasslands (including spinifex) cover large areas of western and central Australia on dunes, sandy plains, and rocky ranges.

Small hardy plants may remain hidden for months or years in the vast deserts until sudden rains cause them to bloom. Virtually no plants are found on salt lake beds. Many Australian desert plants are related to species found in the world’s wetter climates. In Australia, however, they evolved as the continent became increasingly drier. As a result, many have hardened, pointed leaves of reduced size—a trait called scleromorphy.

Dinkum

Callistemons, or bottlebrushes, are found in the eastern and western coastal areas, often along creeks or swamps. Some coastal areas are spotted with salt marsh, seagrass, and mangroves. On the northern and northeastern coasts of Queensland, rainforests teem with life, including tropical flowering plants, palms, and laurels. In the thickest and most-luxuriant areas of rainforests, the trees form three or more canopy layers of branches hanging one above the other, entangled with shrubs, lianas (woody vines), and epiphytes (air plants). The temperate rainforests of Tasmania are dominated by myrtle beeches and swathed in tree ferns and mosses called moss forests. Tasmania’s Huon pine trees, some of which are more than 2,000 years old, are among the oldest living trees in the world. More than two-fifths of Australia’s rainforests are in conservation areas.

Exotic (foreign) plants brought into Australia are a major threat to native species. Among the exotic weeds are wild turnip and hoary cress, which compete with crops as well as native plants. Lantana, blackberries, bracken fern, and Paterson’s curse overrun pastures. Cape tulip and Saint-John’s-wort can poison livestock or taint food. Algae block drainage channels and smother freshwater plants. In addition, crops such as wheat, sugarcane, corn (maize), and alfalfa are among the most widespread exotic plants. Their cultivation has had profound—though often understated—environmental impacts.

Animal Life

Australia is world famous for zoological curiosities that evolved for millions of years in isolated safety from predators and away from competition for food with other animals. Fossils testify to Australia’s ancient animal life. Among the continent’s prehistoric animals were giant wombats and mihirungs, which were flightless birds standing 10 feet (3 meters) high. Fossil monitor lizards called goannas were 20 feet (6 meters) long and weighed 1,300 pounds (600 kilograms). That is twice as big as today’s record-holding lizards, the Komodo dragons of Indonesia. At Riversleigh, in northern Queensland, fossils of giant pythons, carnivorous kangaroos, and horned turtles have been discovered.

Native to Australia today are more than 260 species of mammals, more than half of which are pouched marsupials. The continent is also home to hundreds of species of birds, reptiles, and amphibians. There are some 4,000 species of fish. Australia has tens of thousands of insect species and several hundred types of spiders. Besides estuarine crocodiles, the only Australian animals that will feed on humans are sharks and, of course, mosquitoes and fleas. However, numerous spiders, insects, snakes, and other animals are poisonous to humans.

Monotremes

Monotremes are animals of an order of mammals that lay eggs. The only living monotremes are the platypus and the echidnas, or spiny anteaters. Platypuses are found nowhere else in the world. The short-beaked echidna is found throughout Australia and on the island of New Guinea (which is also home to the two other species of this shy creature).

The platypus uses its webbed feet and its broad, sensitive bill to nuzzle food from river bottoms. It can be found in Tasmania and the eastern and southern parts of the mainland. The males have a poisonous spur on each hind leg. Although the poison is not fatal to humans, it can cause agonizing pain.

Kristi L. Bowman

The short-beaked echidna uses its snout to probe for termites and other insects, which stick to the saliva on its tongue. Heavily armored, the echidna has long sharp spines on the upper surfaces and sides of its body. Its limbs are short and powerful, and its feet have claws. The male has a retractable spur on each hind limb that releases a weak poison. It is from this that the animal gets its name—“echidna” is derived from a Greek word for viper.

Marsupials

Australia has more than 140 marsupial species, including opossums, koalas, wombats, kangaroos, and wallabies. Unlike placental mammals (such as humans and whales), which do not give birth until the fetus has become highly developed, marsupials give birth at a very early stage. They then carry and suckle their young in an external pouch on their abdomen. The pouch protects the young from the elements.

Australia is home to more than 50 species of kangaroos and their close relatives. These macropods (meaning “big feet”) have large hind legs for hopping. Their heavy tails help them balance. Among the diverse animals in the kangaroo family are tree kangaroos, wallaroos, wallabies, pademelons, quokkas, and rat kangaroos. Their sizes range from about a pound (0.5 kilogram) to 200 pounds (90 kilograms). The largest are the gray, or forester, kangaroo and the red kangaroo. Males of both species may exceed 8 feet (2.4 meters) from nose to tail.

Although kangaroos are thought of as a symbol of Australia, many cattle and sheep station owners regard them as vermin because they compete with livestock for food. Official policy now allows for annual kangaroo hunting seasons, which are called “harvests.” Some Australian officials argue that the numbers of certain species must be controlled—much like the control of deer populations with hunting seasons in the United States. The most commonly killed kangaroos are the large red, eastern gray, and western gray kangaroos, which may collectively number as many as 50 million at times.

Koalas are tree-dwelling marsupials that feed almost exclusively on eucalyptus leaves. Their pouches inconveniently open backward (like those of their closest relative, the wombat). Koalas were once abundant in the eastern forests, but in the early 20th century hunters killed large numbers of them for their fur. They exported two million koala pelts in 1924 alone. Australian law now prohibits koala hunting. Koala habitat is being damaged and fragmented, however—especially in southern Queensland—by urban development and occasional bushfires.

Australian opossums, or phalangers, are tree-climbing marsupials. They include the cuscus, a monkeylike marsupial; the ringtail opossum; and gliders, which are also called flying phalangers. The tiny pygmy gliding opossum is an acrobatic, mouselike animal found in eastern forests. Since it is active at night, it is rarely seen. Its tree-to-tree “flights” are really prolonged leaps aided by membranes between its limbs that have a parachute effect.

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The Tasmanian devil is a slow-moving, clumsy doglike marsupial that lives only in Tasmania. Although it is widely regarded as a fierce killer of animals, it is actually a poor hunter. It usually feeds on carrion, or dead meat, much like a vulture. The Tasmanian devil has clawed toes and is mostly black with white bands. It averages 28 inches (71 centimeters) in length with a 10-inch (25-centimeter) tail.

Reptiles

There are about 770 reptile species in Australia, including numerous crocodiles, lizards, snakes, turtles, and tortoises. The seagoing estuarine, or saltwater, crocodile is found along the northern coasts of Australia. It lives in saltwater estuaries and river mouths. Males average 16 feet (5 meters) in length but can reach 23 feet (7 meters). Crocodiles feed on fish, crabs, water rats, and occasionally larger prey, including horses, cattle, and humans. Crocodiles often drown and then dismember their prey. The smaller freshwater crocodile is found in the billabongs (streambeds) and lagoons of monsoonal rivers. It is normally harmless to humans. Crocodile-skin handbags and shoes were once highly prized but are now seen as contributing to animal cruelty. Crocodile hunting is banned in much of Australia. However, in some areas crocodile farms raise the animals for meat.

Jean-Paul Ferrero—Ardea London

Australia’s hundreds of lizard species are the dominant predators in desert ecosystems. The largest is the desert perentie, averaging 5.2 feet (1.6 meters) long but known to reach 8.2 feet (2.5 meters). The gecko is a lizard whose padded, clinging digits enable it to move and rest on rocks, walls, and ceilings. Geckos are able to snap off their still-wriggling tails to distract predators while making an escape. Among the dragon lizards are the thorny devil, the water dragon, and the frilled lizard. The frilled lizard unfolds its ruff like an umbrella when alarmed. Skinks with smooth, silky scales are common sights in suburban gardens.

Of Australia’s marine turtles, the largest is the leatherback, or leathery, turtle. It grows up to 10 feet (3 meters) in length and 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) in weight. Marine turtles thrive in Australia’s warm tropical seas. They come ashore—where they are vulnerable to animals and human predators—to lay scores of eggs in the beach sand. An extraordinary navigational sense permits turtles to return to the very beach where they were hatched.

Australia is the only continent where venomous snakes outnumber the nonvenomous ones. However, only 20 or so of the continent’s more than 100 species of venomous snakes (including many sea snakes) can kill humans. Among the nonvenomous types are carpet snakes, file snakes, and several species of constricting python. The longest is the amethystine, or rock, python. It averages 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) in length, but it can reach a maximum length of 28 feet (8.5 meters).

Australia’s most dangerous snakes include the tiger snake; the eastern and western brown snakes; the mulga, or king brown, snake; death adders; the red-bellied black snake; and taipans. The venom of the inland taipan, or fierce snake, can kill 100,000 mice, making it one of the world’s most deadly land snakes. Antidotes, if administered promptly, can normally counteract snake venom.

Spiders and insects

Many of Australia’s poisonous animals are spiders. The Sydney funnel-web spider, which spins a silken tube at the entrance to its burrow, has killed unsuspecting gardeners. Other poisonous species include trapdoor spiders, which seal their burrows with a plug of earth, and the redback, or black widow, spider, which lurks in outhouses under toilet lids. In addition, many of Australia’s 80,000 known insect species sting.

The continent’s termites build towering nests, or termitaria. Some of them surpass 23 feet (7 meters) in height and are connected to food sources by 110 yards (100 meters) of tunnels and galleries. The nests built in the Northern Territory by the compass, or magnetic, termite are aligned north-south. This minimizes exposure to the tropical sun.

Birds

About 750 bird species are found in Australia. Of these, more than 350 are unique to Australia. However, the continent has no woodpeckers, vultures, true finches, or flamingos. The distant ancestors of many indigenous Australian birds originated in Asia or Gondwana. Many Australian birds are closely related to those found on New Guinea, among them the birds of paradise, bowerbirds, and spangled drongo. Many of the seabirds and waders migrate between Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. The muttonbird, or short-tailed shearwater, flies to Japan in the Northern Hemisphere.

Some common Australian birds include the Australian magpie, willie wagtail, Australian magpie-lark, welcome swallow, black-faced cuckoo-shrike, white-faced heron, and Australian kestrel. Other native species are mound-building birds, which nest in hot anthills, and the black swan, the symbol of Western Australia. Also native to the continent are honeyeaters, nocturnal frogmouths, and kingfishers.

V. Serventy—Bruce Coleman Inc.

The flightless, nomadic emu is the largest native bird and the second largest living bird in the world. It can be found almost anywhere in inland Australia. It may surpass 6.5 feet (2 meters) in height. The emu is also fast. It accelerates in short bursts to 30 miles (48 kilometers) per hour.

Lyrebirds are unique to Australia and can be found in the eastern forests. Among the largest songbirds in the world, they can exceed 3 feet (0.9 meter) in length. Lyrebirds can mimic the sounds of more than 20 other songbirds. Similar in appearance to peacocks, they are famous for their tail-twirling courtship displays. Yet humans rarely see these birds.

Bruce Coleman Ltd.

Singularly Australian birdcalls come from the kookaburra, which makes a raucous throaty mocking shriek of pseudo-laughter. The crested bellbird’s call has ringing, tinkling tones. Among the most colorful birds are parrots. They include gaudily colored rosellas, small grass-eating parakeets, tree-dwelling lorikeets, and budgerigars. Among the numerous cockatoos are the galahs (sometimes with a thousand in a flock), sulphur-crested white cockatoos, ganggangs, and glossy black cockatoos. The illegal smuggling of parrots and cockatoos out of Australia remains a problem.

Extinct and non-native animals

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Aboriginal peoples may have contributed directly or indirectly to some extinctions thousands of years ago. However, the pace of extinctions has increased rapidly since the time of European settlement. This is a result of mechanized farming, pollution, deforestation, and—above all else—the importation of exotic species of plants and animals. Some 25 species of native birds and mammals disappeared in less than 200 years. Among them are the Darling Downs hopping mouse, the King Island emu, the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine), the broad-faced potoroo, and various kinds of bandicoots and wallabies.

G.R. Roberts

The first exotic import was the dingo, a type of wild dog. It was probably brought by Asian fishers between 3,500 and 4,000 years ago. For a study in sheer animal cunning, it would be difficult to surpass the dingo, also known by the Aboriginal name warrigal. The dingo is a fairly large canine, growing to about 4 feet (1.2 meters) long, including its 1-foot (0.3-meter) tail. Hunting alone or in packs, it eats kangaroos, wallabies, rabbits, and ground birds and has a special fondness for echidnas. It also sometimes runs down and kills sheep and cattle. In some parts of Australia, the dingo carries a bounty on its head. Through competition for food, the dingo may have contributed to the elimination of the Tasmanian devil and the Tasmanian wolf from the mainland.

Wave after wave of non-native animals has assaulted the continent since the start of European colonization. These intruders include rabbits, foxes, and feral livestock—that is, sheep, cattle, pigs, goats, horses, donkeys, water buffalo, and even camels that were once raised on stations (ranches) but have since gone wild. Non-native mollusks and seaweed, which arrived in the ballast (bilge) water of ships, spread quickly and wiped out native species. Cane toads were introduced from South America in 1935 to control beetle pests on sugarcane plantations, but they soon became pests themselves. Invasive birds include the house sparrow, the common starling (infamous for stealing the nests of other birds), the song thrush, the blackbird, the feral pigeon (rock dove), and, from India, the common mynah and the red-whiskered bulbul.

Water buffalo were introduced into the Northern Territory in the 1820s and 1830s. Abandoned, they formed feral herds that have since damaged wetlands and waterways with their wallowing. They have been slaughtered (often by game hunters) to control buffalo-fly infestations. One-humped camels were imported in the mid-1800s to aid in exploration and trade across vast deserts. Many of them were soon put out of work by railroads and, later, by automobiles.

Rabbits were first released into the wild in 1859 as animals that “could do little harm” and to provide a nostalgic target for hunting. But they multiplied rapidly in a landscape that was relatively free of natural predators (except dingoes and non-native foxes). A plague of millions of rabbits spread over eastern and central Australia. The rabbits severely damaged the crops of many farms, large tracts of grassland, and forests.

In an attempt to stop the march of rabbits westward, the Australian government began building the world’s longest fence in 1901. It has been called by various names, including the Rabbit-Proof Fence, the State Barrier Fence, the State Vermin Fence, and the Emu Fence. The fence stretched from Eighty Mile Beach on the north coast (east of Port Hedland) across the deserts and savannas of the center-west to a point on the southern coast (west of Esperance). Even before it was completed, rabbits arrived farther westward, so additional interconnected fences were added. The total length of the barrier was 2,023 miles (3,256 kilometers). Nevertheless, the rabbit population proved impossible to control until the rabbit-killing disease myxomatosis was purposely introduced. Parts of the fence are still maintained in southwestern Australia to protect farms from migratory emus, feral goats, and other pests.

Two of the most damaging exotic predators are foxes and feral cats. Hunters introduced foxes to Australia in the late 1800s, wishing to reproduce the upper-class foxhunts of Britain. Australia’s feral cats are mainly descendants of house cats. Foxes and cats—ruthless hunters of small mammals and birds—have had devastating impacts across the continent. (This is one reason why many animal-rights and environmental groups promote cat neutering.) Despite hopes that the Rabbit-Proof Fence would aid in slowing the westward movement of foxes, these animals had invaded much of the continent by the 1920s.

Sea animals

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Australia has about 4,000 fish species, 500 coral species, and numerous seabirds and marine mammals. Its tropical coral reefs teem with life. Yet inland, owing to arid conditions, there are only about 150 freshwater fishes. Among them are the carnivorous barramundi (giant perch). Commercial fishers concentrate on barracuda; gemfish, or hake; tuna; and Australian salmon in the deep, cold waters off the southern coasts.

The world’s smallest penguin is the little blue, or fairy, penguin. It can be found off the coasts of southern and eastern Australia and nearby islands. These native birds stand about 14 inches (35 centimeters) tall and weigh only about 2 pounds (1 kilogram). Tourists flock to Victoria’s Phillip Island to see the penguins waddle ashore to their burrows each night.

Whales migrate along the Australian coast. They include sperm whales, southern right whales, humpback whales, and blue whales. The latter are the world’s largest living animals, averaging 95 feet (29 meters) in length. The country’s last whaling station, at Albany, Western Australia, closed in 1978. In 1980 whaling was outlawed in all Australian waters.

The dolphins called killer whales or orcas may hunt in large packs, preying on seals, penguins, whales, and other dolphins. Several other species of dolphin frolic off the Australian coast. The spinner dolphin leaps almost vertically above the waves while rotating at high speed.

The major scavengers in Australian waters are sharks. They voraciously shred and swallow marine carrion, but they also attack living creatures. Shark attacks on humans are rare. Since shark nets were installed at Sydney Harbour in 1937, there has been only a single fatality there from a shark attack. However, sharks can asphyxiate quickly when snared in nets. The most dangerous shark is the great white shark. Australia’s other sharks include the bronze whaler, gray whaler, tiger, blue pointer, hammerhead, and paisley-patterned wobbegong. The coast is also plagued by the blue-ringed octopus, which delivers a fatal bite, and the box jellyfish, whose trailing tentacles carry venomous cells. Other poisonous animals of Australian waters include a snail called the geographer cone, the well-camouflaged stonefish, and assorted stingrays.

Nature Parks and Conservation Areas

Humans simultaneously depend on and damage the environment in many ways. In an effort to balance the economic “use” or “development” of natural areas with the need to conserve and enjoy them, the Australian government has created numerous protected areas. (As discussed above, there are also many concerns over the endangerment of plant and animal species.) There are more than 600 national parks and thousands of state, territory, and federal conservation areas. Together, they cover more than a tenth of Australia’s landmass. These parks and reserves protect wilderness areas and habitats, prehistoric rock art, sacred or ceremonial Aboriginal sites, and sites of historic or scientific interest. In addition, there are more than 40 marine parks, which cover more than one-third of Australia’s oceans. Different parts of the marine parks provide different levels of protection for sea life from such activities as fishing and oil and gas production.

Australia was one of the first countries to create national parks and nature reserves. Kings Park in Perth dates from 1872, and Sydney’s Royal National Park dates from 1879. Yet most of the significant natural and cultural sites have been identified, inventoried, and systematically protected since only 1970. National parks are intended primarily for public recreation. Moreover, only a small fraction of Australia’s natural, marine, and cultural areas are under federal protection. Because most are controlled by state or territorial governments, the amount of actual environmental protection varies from place to place.

In recognition of and respect for Aboriginal rights, the federal government has granted Aboriginal groups legal title to the national parks Uluru–Kata Tjuta (formerly called Ayers Rock–Mount Olga) and Kakadu, both in the Northern Territory, and Booderee, in New South Wales. The national director of Parks Australia and Aboriginal-controlled management boards jointly manage those parks.

Australian Scenics

Some protected areas have benefited from additional attention and funding in recent years. This is particularly true of areas that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has added to the World Heritage List. Australia’s World Heritage sites include such areas as the Great Barrier Reef, the Tasmanian Wilderness (covering about a fifth of that island), and the Wet Tropics of Queensland. Among the others are Shark Bay, the Willandra Lakes Region, Macquarie Island, the Greater Blue Mountains Area, and the Uluru–Kata Tjuta, Kakadu, and Purnululu national parks. Concern over damage to the Great Barrier Reef has led the government to enforce controls on scuba divers (who can accidentally kill many species), tourist craft, commercial fishing, and oil drilling. Many parts of the reef are protected by state, national, and marine parks.

Australia has major zoos in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, and Dubbo, New South Wales. Native Australian animals can be seen at parks such as the Cleland Wildlife Park, South Australia; Healesville Sanctuary, Victoria; and Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, Queensland.

People and Culture

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Australia’s population grew steadily from about 3.8 million in 1901 to more than 23 million in 2016. With about 90 percent of its people now living in cities, suburbs, and towns, Australia is among the world’s most urbanized countries. In fact, more than 60 percent of all Australians live in the metropolitan areas of the eight state and territorial capitals. The country’s population is largely concentrated within 220 miles (350 kilometers) of the eastern and southeastern coasts. The only other center of dense population is the southwestern corner of Western Australia, in and around Perth. New South Wales is the most populous state, followed by Victoria and Queensland. An entire third of the continent—the semiarid rangeland surrounding western and central Australia—is sparsely settled. Another third is virtually empty desert.

Ethnic Groups

The people of Australia claim more than 300 different ancestries. This diversity represents a dramatic change since the mid-20th century, when most Australians were still of British or Irish descent. Although the population remains mainly European in origin, the proportion of European Australians has fallen as the population of Asian Australians has increased. The number of Indigenous Australians—Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples—has also grown in recent decades. These groups represent about 3 percent of the population. Many Australians consider themselves to be of mixed ancestry.

Race and ethnicity are problematic terms in Australia, as in the rest of the world. Generally speaking, a “race” is not a fixed, biological description (despite the beliefs of many racists to the contrary). Instead, a race is a social category that attempts to organize people into groups loosely based on appearance (such as skin color or facial features) and on ideas concerning biological ancestry (such as family lineage). These social categories are defined in different ways by different social groups. Whether or not people are conscious of their racial perceptions, they often think of race when they define themselves and others. In many societies this results in racial discrimination, in which people are treated unfairly because of perceived racial differences.

Ethnicity is not the same as race, though many people confuse the two terms. Ethnicity refers to cultural differences that are often expressed as different languages, religions, foods, and traditions based on one’s national origin. Because of ethnic differences, people who appear to pertain to one racial group may, in fact, have very little in common. They may have vastly different customs, religious views, and worldviews. For example, there is no single European ethnicity. Instead, there are several ethnic traditions from Europe, though white people from Europe may appear to be of the same race. For the sake of simplicity, this article will describe white people in Australia as ethnically European, though most would identify their ethnic heritage as mainly British, with only a few other European influences.

Australian Aboriginal peoples

The ancestors of the Aboriginal peoples settled on the continent tens of thousands of years ago. Many Indigenous Australians prefer not to use the English anthropological term Aboriginal. Instead, they refer to themselves in their own language, using the words for “person” or “people”—for example, Koorie in the southern and eastern states, Yolngu in the Northern Territory, Arangu in central Australia, Nyunga in Western Australia, and Nungga in South Australia.

More than 590,000 people identified themselves as Aboriginal in the 2016 census. Another 26,000 people claimed mixed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander origin. More than one-third of Aboriginal Australians live in big cities. Many of the rest live either in towns and other so-called “inner regional areas” or on farms, on cattle and sheep stations, or in other “outer regional areas.” Only about one-fifth of Aboriginal people still live in remote areas, where they rely (in part) on traditional skills as seminomadic hunter-gatherers.

Some three-fifths of Aboriginal people are concentrated in New South Wales and Queensland. In the Northern Territory, Aboriginal people make up more than a quarter of the population. Their contributions are symbolically acknowledged in the ochre-red, black, and white colors of the Northern Territory flag.

John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland Neg: 78623

Although Aboriginal peoples have lived in Australia for millennia, their relatively dispersed traditional populations had few negative impacts on the environment. They may have lived in relative balance with the natural forces around them. Aboriginal societies were not utopias, though they certainly were a collection of viable, naturally and socially balanced cultures widely spread across the Australian continent. Since the time of European contact more than 200 years ago, most aspects of their traditional culture have been severely modified, and some have been destroyed. Much of the damage to Aboriginal cultures resulted from the assimilation policies introduced by the Australian government in the first half of the 20th century. The goal of these policies was to force Aboriginal groups to abandon their traditional ways and adopt the customs and beliefs of white society.

Since 1967, when Aboriginal people gained Australian citizenship, they have increasingly worked to restore a sense of Indigenous history, dignity, and economic vitality to their diverse peoples. At times, however, some politicians and business interests have opposed them. This has especially been true in cases where Aboriginal people have argued that they should have legal title to large expanses of land. Today about one-fifth of Australia’s land is either owned or controlled by Indigenous peoples, mostly by Aboriginal groups. Aboriginal lands include more than half of the Northern Territory, part of which is the great Arnhem Land reserve, created in 1931. Many of the Aboriginal lands are in the driest and most barren parts of the continent. (For more details on Aboriginal cultures, see these sections below: Languages, Religions, Culture, and History.)

Torres Strait Islander peoples

Torres Strait Islander peoples are Indigenous groups distinct from the Aboriginal peoples. They get their name from the Torres Strait, a waterway that separates the Cape York Peninsula of Australia from southern Papua New Guinea. In the 2016 Australian census, about 59,000 people reported being of Torres Strait Islander origin or mixed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander origin. Several thousand live on islands in the Torres Strait, but most live in other regions, mainly in Cairns, Brisbane, Townsville, and other coastal towns of northern Queensland. Traditionally a seafaring and fishing people, they have long hunted turtles and dugong (a marine mammal). They have traded with groups on both sides of the strait. Some have also been involved in pearl diving. Islander culture is similar in many respects to those of Papua New Guinea and other Pacific Island peoples.

Europeans

From the late 1700s until well into the 20th century, Australia’s non-Indigenous population was almost entirely European. The British government founded Australia as a prison colony in 1788. The first colonists were British convicts—sent to the continent as punishment—and the security personnel, such as guards and soldiers, who accompanied them.

In the 1800s Australia’s immigration policies were aimed at occupying—and then defending—a large continent and developing its mining and agricultural resources. The colonial governments used financial assistance and other incentives to lure European immigrants who might have otherwise been tempted to migrate to North America. European families were in especially high demand. A large percentage of the earlier convicts were male. Many of the Europeans who came to Australia because of gold rushes in the 1800s were also male. This led to a problematic lack of European women. People feared that many single men, without wives or family support, would be more likely to cause a host of social problems, from thievery and drunken brawling to rape and murder.

The Australian colonies paid the fares of some 700,000 British migrants between 1831 and 1900. Since then, federal programs have controlled the types, numbers, and skills of subsidized migrants as economic conditions have permitted. The percentage of European-descended Australians has not decreased drastically in recent years, despite an increase in Asian immigration. The main reason for the continuously large “white” population, apart from childbearing, is the yearly influx of tens of thousands of immigrants from New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Asians

The growth of Australia’s Asian population has been led by migration from China and India. The gold rushes of the 1850s attracted Chinese market gardeners and other entrepreneurs into Australia. They dominated vegetable growing for the ensuing 50 years, at first around the suburban fringes of cities. They later settled around country towns following improvements in irrigation, food processing, and storage. Indians first came to Australia in the 1800s as laborers and servants. They were small in number, however, until an immigration boom in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. By 2016 Chinese and Indian Australians each made up about 2 percent of country’s total population. Other major Asian groups trace their ancestries to the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

Languages

The official language of Australia is English. Australians have a distinctive accent and vivid slang terms. Western Australians are often called “sand gropers,” cattle rustlers are “poddy-dodgers,” and anything excellent can be called a “bottler.” An outhouse (outside lavatory) is a “dunny,” while someone who acts foolish may be called a “galah.” In addition to English, the most commonly spoken languages in Australia are Mandarin (a Chinese language), Arabic, Cantonese (another Chinese language), Vietnamese, and Italian.

At the time of the first European contact in the 1780s, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples spoke perhaps 250 languages and about 600 dialects. Because of their extensive trade networks and clan connections, many Indigenous Australians learned two or more tongues. In the 2016 census, one in 10 Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people reported that they still spoke one of 150 Indigenous languages at home. Many of these languages are spoken by only a handful of people, however, and are in danger of dying out. The loss of so many Indigenous languages is largely due to past government policies that forced Indigenous children to speak English. The Indigenous languages with the largest number of speakers include Pitjantjatjara, Warlpiri, and Aranda (Arrernte).

In order to preserve their languages, many Indigenous elders have been making recordings of oral histories. In addition, some schools and universities have added Indigenous language lessons. A national organization called the Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages (FATSIL) supports community-based language programs. The federal government has aided in raising the status of Indigenous languages by renaming several parks and landmarks, such as Uluru–Kata Tjuta (formerly Ayers Rock–Mount Olga) National Park.

Religions

Australians enjoy religious freedom, as guaranteed by the constitution. The most widespread religion is Christianity. The percentage of Christian Australians has fallen significantly, however, from 88 percent in 1966 to 52 percent in 2016. The next largest group of Australians, about 30 percent, consider themselves nonreligious. Growing numbers of Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus reflect the rise of immigration from Asia in recent decades. Each of those groups makes up about 2–3 percent of the country’s population. Australia also has smaller numbers of Sikhs, Jews, and adherents of other religions.

For the first 50 years of European settlement, the Anglican church had the hallmarks of an established church for the richer, ruling class. This included a monopoly on education, both in cities and in the Outback. The Roman Catholic Church served poorer, often Irish communities. It supported the working class and later its political wing, the Australian Labor Party. Both denominations now minister to all classes. Many old feuds have ended owing to ecumenism—that is, efforts to increase cooperation and respect among the members of different churches. In 1977 many of Australia’s Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches joined together to form the Uniting Church.

Most of Australia’s Indigenous peoples are Christians, following centuries of activity by Christian missionaries and other efforts to change and suppress Indigenous cultures. However, some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have maintained their traditional spiritual values. Others have become involved in rescuing, or reawakening to, their cultures’ ancient beliefs and rituals.

As with other aspects of Aboriginal culture, spiritual beliefs have varied according to each group’s experiences, locations, and interactions with others. Most Aboriginal spiritual beliefs are deeply involved with the land, which is considered the mother of all living things to which the spirit returns for rebirth following death. Aboriginal people do not own the land: they are part of it. They are its custodians, believing that ancestral beings created the plants, animals, people, and places during a period called The Dreaming, or the Dreamtime. (These ancestral spirits, who must be given honor and respect, are believed to visit the land.) The Dreaming is seen as a creative time that had a beginning but has no foreseeable end. It signifies the continuity of life, unlimited by space and time.

Only the oldest Aboriginal people have full knowledge of The Dreaming and, therefore, social and spiritual authority. Some aspects of life are sacred to men, and others are sacred to women, who have spiritual autonomy (self-direction) in Aboriginal society. Still other aspects of life are sacred to both. In addition, spirituality and art are often intertwined in poetry, the visual arts, and music.

Like the Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islander peoples believe that all living things and the natural world were created by ancestral beings. Their stories focus on the stars. They tell of Tagai, a great fisherman and spirit being who the Torres Strait Islander peoples believe created the world. Tagai is represented by a constellation of stars in the southern sky.

Some Indigenous, white, and Asian individuals have developed belief systems that incorporate elements of both Christianity and Indigenous beliefs. Similar kinds of blended, or syncretic, religions exist in most regions of the world.

Immigration

Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 effectively limited immigration to Europeans only. It was an embodiment of what was then the country’s White Australia Policy. The act aimed, in part, at excluding Asian laborers who would work for lower wages than other Australians. The Australian government began relaxing the White Australia Policy in the mid-20th century. It ended the policy in the mid-1970s. The federal Office of Multicultural Affairs was established in 1987 under a new policy to promote social unity through racial and ethnic tolerance. Multicultural affairs are now handled by the Department of Social Services.

Immigration to Australia today is restricted not by race or nationality but by employability and skills. In addition, the country admits some refugees. They have included, for example, Jews who left Nazi Germany in the 1940s, eastern Europeans and Asians fleeing from communist regimes, and persons displaced by war. The restriction of government assistance to only British migrants ended after World War II.

Virtual Museum of Italian Immigration in the Illawarra; used with permission of ITSOWEL

Virtual Museum of Italian Immigration in the Illawarra; used with permission of ITSOWEL

New waves of migration changed the face of Australia in the postwar period. In the 1950s and 1960s many migrants arrived from southern and eastern Europe, especially Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia. In the 1970s and early 1980s Australia saw many new arrivals from Southeast Asia, notably Vietnam and Cambodia. The number of Chinese Australians grew later in the 1980s as the government encouraged Chinese students to come to Australia. In the 1990s the violent breakup of Yugoslavia brought another wave of migration from the Balkan region of Europe.

In the early 21st century about a quarter of Australians were born in countries other than Australia. The largest number of migrants continued to come from the United Kingdom. The percentage of British-born Australians was on a downward trend, however, while the numbers of Asian migrants was on the rise. Following the United Kingdom, the leading sources of foreign-born Australians in 2016 were New Zealand and four Asian countries: China, India, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Italy also continued to contribute a large number of migrants, along with South Africa, Malaysia, and Germany.

Clearly, Australia has become a much more open and diverse society than it was in the not so distant past. Nevertheless, it continues to enforce a controversial policy called mandatory detention in its handling of refugees. The origins of the policy date to the mid-1970s, when people displaced by the Vietnam War began arriving in Australia by boat. A second wave of “boat people” in the late 1980s and early 1990s—this time mostly Cambodians—led to the introduction of the mandatory detention policy in 1992. It requires authorities to detain any noncitizen who arrives in Australia without authorization. There is no limit on the length of time a person can be held, and children can be detained as well as adults. The Australian government maintains that mandatory detention is a necessary part of its national security strategy. Critics argue that it is a violation of human rights. (See alsoimmigration to Australia.)

Culture

With its increasing mix of different European, Indigenous, and Asian peoples, Australia has a growing number of cultural traditions. These range from people’s spiritual beliefs to their business relations and from their family structures and friendships to interactions with strangers. Culture, after all, is the sum total of behaviors, beliefs, and customs that people learn as they grow up, or that they become accustomed to, while living in a given society. This broad definition of culture includes religion and language (discussed above), the arts, and the ways in which social and economic status are gained. Culture also includes the many elements of popular culture, such as food, entertainment, and day-to-day family life.

People from one cultural background tend to behave and think about the world in ways that may seem foreign or strange to people from other cultures. Like European countries, the United States, and many other nations, Australian society has been heavily influenced by a history of racist policies and actions—particularly at the expense of non-European peoples. However, many Australians are now working together to minimize the effects of discrimination, racism, and other narrow-minded worldviews. They seek to show tolerance for people whom they cannot truly understand.

Popular culture and daily life

Different groups in Australia have different tastes, lifestyles, and traditions. However, modern technologies such as television, radio, and computers have brought some aspects of a wider popular culture within reach of nearly everyone. For example, most Australians—of European, Aboriginal, or other heritage—tend to relax at night and on weekends in front of their television sets. Many also participate in more-active pastimes. Among the more popular types of TV programs are Australian-made news and current-affairs programs, sporting events, drama series, made-for-TV movies, and children’s programs.

Australians in search of leisure pastimes often visit their nearby beaches. Many also enjoy picnics and backyard barbecues. Organized sports, music concerts (from rock and pop to classical), and movies often attract crowds. Drinking and gambling are major components of popular culture, in spite of the dangers of alcoholism, gambling addiction, and bankruptcy. Young people in search of the nighttime “wild life” usually seek out dance clubs or trendy “boozers” (pubs). Members of most ethnic groups share in these pastimes. However, Aboriginal people are also likely to be devoted to traditional Aboriginal notions of kinship and walkabout—the desire to wander the Outback, to revisit sacred sites, and to reconnect with one’s spirituality as an individual and as a member of social groups.

Food and drink are much loved, but Australian cuisine is still seeking international respect. Among the old staples of Aboriginal groups are leaves of the lemon myrtle tree, wattle seeds, and small tomato-like fruits called bush tomatoes. Macadamia nuts are native to Australia and are now enjoyed around the world. Australian treats with European flavors include Anzac biscuits (crisp oat-and-molasses cookies) and pavlova (a confection of sugar and meringue topped with whipped cream and fruits). There are also regional specialties, such as Balmain Bugs, a cooked lobsterlike crustacean.

Many restaurants now serve a mixture of Eurasian ethnic foods. Various Chinese, Thai, Indian, Italian, and Greek restaurants enjoy popularity. Meanwhile, American-style fatty “fast foods” are served up at alarming rates—though not yet to the extent as in North America.

Australian wines are sold worldwide. Australians drink more beer, soft drinks, and tea than wine, but their wine consumption grew greatly in the late 20th century. Popular convenience foods include frozen pizzas, instant soups and pastas, and microwavable snacks. At barbecues, people grill steaks, “mystery bags” (sausages), and sometimes “bush foods” such as kangaroo and emu meat. Bread or fresh vegetables may be served with dips or a smear of a dark-tinted substance that is uniquely Australian: Vegemite. Vegemite is a sandwich spread consisting mainly of yeast extract. Australians use this standard spread about as commonly as Americans serve peanut butter and jelly.

Sports

Melbourne Age/AP

Australia has been highly successful in international sporting competitions—far more so than might be expected from its relatively small population. In addition, many Australians are avid fans of sports teams. About half of the population attends at least one sporting event each year. Indeed, for some Australians, early and ongoing loyalty to sports teams seems more like a natural birthright than a cultural trait. But this sports devotion tends to be far more than a passive form of entertainment. Most Australians also have numerous opportunities in their lives to participate in sports, both as schoolchildren and as adults. Millions of Australians participate in a physical activity for recreational or competitive reasons. And many of them report that they exercise at least five times per week.

The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) provides sports facilities and high-tech support to the country’s elite athletes, such as those training for Olympic Games. The federal government finances the AIS. Additional support comes from business interests throughout the country, including advertisers and athletic equipment suppliers. Many Australian companies also reap big business from sports. For example, Australian companies involved in management, sports merchandising, and cleaning won contracts worth more than 200 million Australian dollars to provide services for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. With such a combination of big business, government, and fan support, it seems likely that sports culture—and the cult of sports—will remain a fundamental, pervasive social force in Australia.

Colorsport

Australia’s most popular sports include cricket, football (soccer), rugby, and Australian football (or Australian rules football). The latter is a uniquely Australian sport that has been described as a cross between rugby and football (soccer). Australians also enjoy tennis, basketball, cycling, swimming, yachting, surfing, golf, and horse racing. In addition, many Australian women regularly play netball.

The Australian surf stretches 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) from just north of Brisbane on the east coast around the south to Perth on the west coast. It has spawned a huge number of surfers. Enthusiasts of sailing, boating, diving, and water skiing are also numerous. The Sydney–Hobart yacht race, held on Boxing Day (December 26), has become a blue-water classic that attracts many international entries. The continent has produced many world-class swimmers, and Australians invented the swimming styles known as the crawl and the butterfly stroke. Most children learn to swim by the time they are 7 or 8 years old.

Among the major events in Australian sports history was the inauguration of Australian football in Melbourne in 1858. Throughout the 1800s, intercolonial cricket and football (soccer) matches were the focus of much local pride—and, eventually, national pride. In the 1900s, sporting successes put Australia on the world map. This was especially notable during the 1950s, when the 1956 Summer Olympics were held in Melbourne and Australia began scoring victories in Davis Cup tennis. In 1983 an Australian team captured the America’s Cup for yachting. It was the first time anyone other than an American crew had won since the race series began in 1851.

REUTERS/Alamy

In 2000 the Summer Olympics were again held in Australia. The Sydney Games became a national showcase for sport. They were also an international showcase for changing perceptions of Australian race relations. The grand opening ceremonies proudly featured numerous Aboriginal performers. Cathy Freeman, an Australian athlete of Aboriginal ancestry, lit the Olympic torch. She went on to win a gold medal in the women’s 400-meter running race. Australia finished fourth in the total medal count at the 2000 and 2004 Summer Games, behind only the United States, China, and Russia. At the 2000 Paralympic Games in Sydney, Australian athletes won the most medals of any country in the world.

National holidays

Australia Day is celebrated on January 26 to commemorate the arrival of the British First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788. Anzac Day, on April 25, honors war veterans. Other public holidays observed throughout Australia include Good Friday; Easter Saturday, Sunday, and Monday; the British monarch’s birthday; Christmas (December 25); Boxing Day (December 26); and New Year’s Day (January 1). Australians also celebrate Harmony Day (March 21) to promote multiculturalism and racial harmony. Several states observe Labor Day, or Eight-Hours Day. South Australia celebrates Proclamation Day. Western Australia observes Foundation Day.

Traditional Aboriginal art

Aboriginal art, music, and dance—including the festive corroboree—are intimately linked with spiritual life and the land. This is because many Aboriginal people understand themselves as spiritual, creative extensions of a multilayered physical world. Before European contact, Aboriginal peoples in different regions had their own styles of art, music, and decoration, including the designs used on tools and weapons. Many Aboriginal groups still maintain traditions that are different from each other.

Australia’s national and Commonwealth heritage lists together include listings of several dozen Indigenous places. The National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association Dance College is a major Australian cultural institute. (More achievements of Aboriginal art and artists are noted in the sections below.)

Visual arts

For thousands of years, Aboriginal people have created much art for spiritual, ritual, and other purposes, including pleasure. Traditional Aboriginal art forms include painting or engraving on tree bark, the ground, or rocks (called petroglyphs), sculpture of hard sand or wood, body painting, and delicate basketry. Many paintings featured patterns of lines, waves, zigzags and geometric shapes, especially in red, white, and yellow ochre. Some of the colorful paintings preserved in the north are in a style known as X-ray art. In that style, animals and people are painted with their internal organs showing. Some Aboriginal petroglyphs date back tens of thousands of years.

Joan Woodard

Today, Aboriginal people continue to paint and engrave sacred objects, tools, and weapons such as the boomerang to express religious stories. Some Aboriginal people keep the tradition of painting their bodies in spiritually powerful designs—often with white lines and geometric shapes—based on engravings and paintings left by their ancestors. Some of the modern artists who gained popularity for blending the traditions of Indigenous and Western art are Albert Namatjira, Rover Thomas, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula of the Papunya Tula art movement. Art projects such as the Pintupi people’s transfer of Dreaming designs from sand paintings to painted canvases have fostered cross-cultural understanding between Aboriginal and other Australians.

Long after European settlement, Australia’s taste and style in the visual arts continued to be largely imported from Europe, and then from the United States after World War II. Gradually Australians began to express their unique environment and cultural experiences in artwork. Green-lawned pseudo-English landscape paintings began to be replaced with depictions of the harsh, brown reality of deserts and eucalyptus forests in the Outback. S.T. Gill’s watercolors of the gold rushes of the 1850s began to open settlers’ eyes to the authentic Australian landscape. The Heidelberg School of Impressionists was founded outside Melbourne in the 1880s by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, and Charles Conder. For European-descended whites, this was the first truly Australian school of painting.

From the 1890s to 1930, Bertram Mackennal was Australia’s most famous sculptor. The Cenotaph and the Shakespeare Memorial in Sydney are his best-known pieces. Rayner Hoff designed and carved figures on the Anzac War Memorial in Sydney and the South Australian War Memorial in Adelaide, including some that stand 16 feet (5 meters) high. These remain some of Australia’s best-known sculptures, along with the sculpture adorning Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance.

Courtesy of the owner

Since the 1900s, nearly every style of painting and sculpture has had Australian contributors, including Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, John Olsen, Brett Whiteley, Lyndon Dadswell, Norma Redpath, and Margaret Priest. Among the more-original painters have been William Dobell, Fred Williams, and Russell Drysdale, known for his empty red landscapes and lonely, surreal figures. Well-known contemporary artists include William Robinson, Tracey Moffatt, Rosella Namok, and Lindy Lee. The works of Australia’s “new media” artists incorporate and comment on new technologies, from those of biomedicine to computers and virtual-reality environments.

Cinema

Australian films and television dramas have received increasing attention worldwide. So too have the actors, directors, and production crews involved in making them. Foreign-owned film companies began investing heavily in Australian productions in 2001. In that year the federal government began offering tax breaks (tax offsets) to the companies as a financial incentive. Dozens of films and TV dramas are made in Australia each year, garnering hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet most of the films that Australians view are imports.

Courtesy Australian War Memorial

The Australian film industry began in 1896 when two Frenchmen filmed the running of the Melbourne Cup, Australia’s most prestigious horse race. Between 1903 and 1914 about 50 feature films were made in Australia. In the 1920s overseas investors, mainly from the United States and Britain, gained control of movie distribution. They monopolized the business, nearly exclusively screening American and British films. But in 1970 the federal government broke this stranglehold by establishing the Australian Film Development Corporation (later the Australian Film Commission). It made its own documentaries and encouraged investment in local feature films. Then, in 1973, the government founded an Australian national film and television school. It is now called the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). As a result of these initiatives, nearly 400 Australian films were produced between 1970 and 1985—more than had been made in all of its prior history.

British Empire Films Australia

A number of talented Australian directors began to receive recognition in the 1970s. Among them were Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975), Bruce Beresford (The Getting of Wisdom, 1977), Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1978), George Miller (Mad Max, 1979), Phillip Noyce (Newsfront, 1978), and Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career, 1979). The latter two were among the first graduates of AFTRS.

Australia broke through to the American market with two critical hits, Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980) and Weir’s Gallipoli (1981). It achieved a smashing commercial success with Miller’s second Mad Max film, The Road Warrior (1981). Other Australian films that scored worldwide box-office successes include Peter Faiman’s Crocodile Dundee (1986, starring Paul Hogan), Chris Noonan’s family film Babe (1995), and Ray Lawrence’s drama Lantana (2001). Later international successes include the animated film Happy Feet (2006; codirected by Miller) and Baz Luhrmann’s F. Scott Fitzgerald adaptation The Great Gatsby (2013). Miller’s revival of the Mad Max series, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and Garth Davis’s Lion (2016), a dramatization of a true story, were also popular worldwide. Notable among other films of the 1990s are the comedies Muriel’s Wedding (1994) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994); Scott Hicks’s drama Shine (1996), loosely based on the life of a gifted Australian pianist; and Rolf de Heer’s Dance Me to My Song (1998). Monica Pellizzari’s Fistful of Flies (1996) is about a young girl of the Outback discovering her sexuality. Kurt Mundl’s The Messengers of the Gods—Butterflies (1998) is a visually stunning documentary on butterflies and moths. Australian films of note from the early 21st century include Luhrmann’s musical extravaganza Moulin Rouge! (2001), Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004), and Luhrmann’s historical drama Australia (2008).

Several Australian films in recent decades have focused on race and ethnic relations. Among them was Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996), about a Hong Kong family uprooted to the Australian suburbs. Ana Kokkinos’s Head On (1998) is about a young Australian of Greek descent dealing with homosexuality and ethnic issues. Of special note is Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), based on a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It tells the true story of a young girl’s struggle to reunite her Aboriginal family after the government had stolen her, her sister, and her cousin from their community. (During much of the 20th century, it was the government’s policy to forcibly assimilate children of mixed Aboriginal and white ancestry into white Australian society.) Other films with critical perspectives on Australian history and social life include Walkabout (1971), The Man from Snowy River (1982), and A Cry in the Dark (1988).

The influence of Bollywood and anime

As Australia’s population became increasingly multicultural in the years after World War II, the influence of international popular culture on the Australian film industry grew. In 1964 Peter Yiannoudes introduced Australian audiences to Bollywood, the Indian popular film industry, when he screened the motion picture Mother India. Yiannoudes was an immigrant from Cyprus who had first found success importing Greek films. Mother India was a great commercial success, as its theme of overcoming adversity, poverty, and social hardships in order to find love resonated with Australia’s Greek immigrant community. Over time, Bollywood films became increasingly popular with viewers of all ages across a wide variety of nationalities in Australia’s multicultural society.

Two postwar Japanese art forms also have had a big impact on Australian popular culture: manga and anime. Manga is a popular style of comic, and anime is a style of animation that borrowed its childlike, colorful characters from manga. The influence of manga and anime grew steadily in Australia from 1966, when the first anime television series, Astro Boy, aired in the country and became an instant hit. Since the 1960s manga and anime have captivated young Australian audiences through popular television series and movies, such as Pokémon, Hello Kitty, and Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Many Australian artists and film producers have also been inspired to embrace these styles as creators.

Theater

The first European-style play performed in Australia, in 1789, was George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, with a convict cast. Six years later a former convict named Robert Sidaway opened Australia’s first licensed theater. It was a playhouse in the heart of Sydney’s business district. After about two years he was ordered to close it because burglars routinely robbed the homes of audience members while they were at the theater.

Barnett Levey had a massive complex built that included a warehouse, a mill, the Royal Hotel, and eventually Sydney’s first true commercial theater. Named the Theatre Royal, it opened in 1833. Within a decade, full-time professional theaters were built in other major Australian towns and cities. The number of plays presented in a single season was remarkable. In 1835 alone, Sydney’s Theatre Royal staged 50 works. Hit plays from London were in great demand.

Meanwhile, gold miners, pastoralists, and city workers found simple pleasure and relief from drudgery by attending “common” plays of vaudeville, farce, pantomime, and melodrama. These working-class crowds cheered on stock actors playing outlaws, miners, sensible heroines, and credulous English “new chums,” or recent immigrants. Of all the arts, theater shared most in the new wealth and excitement of the gold rushes of the 1850s. In Victorian towns such as Geelong, fine theaters were built. Miners showered the most-popular players with gold nuggets.

Eliza O’Flaherty was the first native Australian actress to earn an international reputation. Another major figure was George Selth Coppin, an English actor who arrived in 1843. He acted in Sydney’s grand Victoria Theatre, made and lost several fortunes, and built six theaters. He was the first local producer to import famous actors from overseas.

By using local playwrights and themes rather than imported dramas, Louis Esson’s Pioneer Players in Melbourne helped foster an authentically Australian theater in the 1920s. So did Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre in Sydney (1930–77). Sumner Locke Elliott’s allegedly blasphemous Rusty Bugles premiered there in 1948. In 1955 the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust staged Ray Lawler’s famous Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. The play portrays the rough-hewn daily lives of aging cane-cutters.

Numerous radical small theaters had developed by the 1970s. Among the groundbreaking works they presented were plays by women and Aboriginal people, groups that had previously been underrepresented. One such play was The First-Born, by Aboriginal playwright Jack Davis.

David Williamson, one of Australia’s highly acclaimed dramatists, is known for plays such as Travelling North (1980), Emerald City (1987), Dead White Males (1995), Influence (2005), and Dream Home (2015). Other playwrights of the late 20th and early 21st centuries include Jack Hibberd, Alex Buzo, Peter Kenna, Dorothy Hewett, Louis Nowra, Michael Gow, and Joanna Murray-Smith. Australia’s principal acting and production school is the National Institute of Dramatic Art.

Music, opera, and dance

Spectrum Colour Library/Heritage-Images/Impact Photos

The first Australian music, dance, and sung poetry arrived with the ancestors of Aboriginal peoples tens of thousands of years ago. However, these early expressions of culture must have changed greatly in the intervening eras. Singing and dancing take place at many Aboriginal spiritual festivals as well as at less-serious occasions. Traditional Aboriginal rituals include complexly worded, rhythmic chants and song cycles (or “songlines”) accompanied by music played on a variety of instruments. The best known of these is a long wooden wind instrument called the didjeridu. Today it is hard to miss the influences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on music in Australia, from traditional chants to popular music that blends Indigenous rhythms with various Western styles.

In colonial times the ballads of white Australians reflected convicts’ experiences and were similar to Irish ballads. Many colonial ballads are still played by folk musicians. Among the wealthier classes, musical entertainment was often in the form of choral singing, instrumental ensembles, and harmonizing with the drawing-room piano. Music fans of all classes frequented amateur concerts in public halls and heard military bands in the parks.

The Victoria Orchestra was Australia’s first, performing in 1888–91. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was assembled in 1906. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra was established in 1915. Also in 1915, a Belgian immigrant named Henri Verbrugghen arrived in Sydney to become founding director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music. State orchestras, established in the 1920s, gave several performances for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra are renowned. Also acclaimed are soloists such as the violinist Richard Tognetti and the pianists Roger Woodward and Simon Tedeschi.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The national opera company, Opera Australia, is one of the busiest in the world. Its home is the majestic (and much-photographed) Sydney Opera House, which is surrounded on three sides by the city’s spectacular harbor. The opera house, which opened in 1973, is actually a major arts center. It contains a concert hall, a large theater for opera and ballet, three smaller theaters, a reception hall, and several restaurants. Among Australia’s world-class concert-hall and opera performers have been Nellie Melba, Florence Austral, and Joan Sutherland, as well as the operatic conductors Charles Mackerras and Richard Bonynge. Other major singing talents have included Deborah Riedel, Lisa Gasteen, and Yvonne Kenny. Among the major dance troupes are the Australian Ballet, the Sydney Dance Company, the Australian Dance Theatre, and the Bangarra Dance Theatre.

Australian musicians have made important contributions to the development of rock music. Rock has been central to Australian popular culture since the late 1950s, when Americans Bill Haley and His Comets first brought rock and roll to the country. In 1958 Johnny O’Keefe became the first Australian rock and roll singer to reach the national charts, with his hit “Wild One.” The first Australian rockers to have an impact outside the country were the Easybeats, who scored an international hit with “Friday on My Mind” in 1966. Australia’s most successful musical exports to North America and Europe have been rock and pop entertainers such as the Bee Gees, Men at Work, Air Supply, AC/DC, Midnight Oil, Olivia Newton-John, INXS, Crowded House, Kylie Minogue, Jet, Keith Urban, Tame Impala, and Courtney Barnett.

Literature

Australia is widely regarded as a nation of readers, despite the high frequency of television viewing and Internet use. The country has one of the highest proportions of book, magazine, and newspaper readers in the world today.

In the thousands of years before contact with Europeans, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples did not have writing systems. However, they created impressive oral (spoken) literatures. Some of these were relayed in Aboriginal “songlines” that carried ideas and images across the continent.

In the early colonial period, writers of European descent simply recorded their impressions of a strange continent for the benefit of a curious British public. Watkin Tench published his journal of the First Fleet and the first European settlement at Sydney. James Hardy Vaux recorded convict slang in his memoirs. Stylish travel accounts were published by such inland explorers as Charles Sturt, who sailed down the Murray River; Edward John Eyre, who crossed the Nullarbor Plain; and Ernest Giles, the first non-Indigenous Australian to behold Kata Tjuta, or the Olgas.

The first works of written fiction in Australia were “guidebook novels”—some romantic, some realistic. They were mainly intended to lure immigrants to Australia. Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall wrote lyrical poems praising the landscape. The first major work of fiction was Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), one of many tales of pioneering life. Another was Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1888), which extols the adventuresome lives of bushrangers (outlaws) and gold miners. Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1874) attempts to convey the realities of convict life. Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection (1899) is a comedy about the Outback.

During the late 1800s, Australian writers began to set themselves apart from Britain. They espoused nationalistic views that helped lead to political independence and federation in 1901. Their catalyst was The Bulletin, a radical, racist, and widely read Sydney journal of politics and literature. It was founded in 1880 by John Haynes. J.F. Archibald, its editor, encouraged his writers to seek their inspiration in the Outback. Such authors included Henry Lawson, the leading bush balladist and the first writer depicted on an Australian banknote, and A.B. (Banjo) Paterson. Paterson wrote the classic poem The Man from Snowy River (1895) and the words for the well-known song “Waltzing Matilda” (about 1895). Among the journal’s other writers were Joseph Furphy, who wrote Such Is Life (1903); Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career (1901); Christopher Brennan; John Shaw Neilson; Bernard O’Dowd; and Mary Gilmore. Poems memorized by generations of Australian schoolchildren date from this period. They include Dorothea Mackellar’s patriotic My Country (1908).

Between the two world wars, Australians produced an increasing number of novels. Some were historical sagas of pioneering. Others tackled more contemporary concerns, such as the 1930s depression, urban life, and interracial sexual relations. In Sydney, Norman Lindsay led a circle of writers who produced a series of exotic works. Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding (1918) remains an outstanding children’s classic. Lindsay’s circle also included the poets Kenneth Slessor, James Phillip McAuley, and R.D. FitzGerald.

After World War II, Australian authors wrote an increasing number of modernistic stories and poems. The novelist Patrick White returned from exile in Britain to become the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1973. His novels include The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), and The Eye of the Storm (1973).

Kristy Wigglesworth/AP

The works of Thomas Keneally, who first became famous for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), often explore individual lives within historical contexts. His novel Schindler’s Ark (1982; also published as Schindler’s List) won the Booker Prize and was made into an acclaimed movie in 1993. Several of his other novels have also been made into films or plays. Other Australians to win the prestigious Booker Prize include Peter Carey, for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001; Australian-born novelist D.B.C. Pierre, for Vernon God Little, in 2003; and Richard Flanagan, for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in 2014.

Christopher Peterson

The best works of poet and novelist David Malouf include An Imaginary Life (1978) and Remembering Babylon (1993), which is set in Queensland. C.J. Koch is best known for The Year of Living Dangerously (1978); The Doubleman (1985), which has a Tasmanian setting; Highways to a War (1995); and Out of Ireland (1999). Shirley Hazzard wrote the ironic love story The Transit of Venus (1980). Kate Grenville is known for her prizewinning novels The Idea of Perfection (1999) and The Secret River (2005), about conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people during colonial times. Kim Scott, with his novel Benang (1999), became the first Aboriginal writer to win the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, which he shared with Thea Astley. Astley’s novel Drylands (1999) deals with the racial divide and reconciliation between Aboriginal peoples and European Australians. Among other highly successful Australian novelists are Brian Castro, Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo), Tim Winton, and Helen Garner.

One of Australia’s most renowned poets is Les Murray, an inventive writer who often dwells on religious matters in Dog Fox Field (1990) and other collections. In his epic novel-poem Fredy Neptune (1999), a German Australian sailor loses his ability to feel anything after witnessing appalling cruelty during World War I. Other notable Australian poets include Robert Gray, author of Piano (1988) and Certain Things (1993); the Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker); and the experimental poets Robert Adamson and John Tranter.

Nonfiction autobiographies have been popular in Australia, including Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass (1981), A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life (1981), Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters (1996), and Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999). Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980) is an account of her trek across Australia with camels. Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) recounts the discovery of her Aboriginal identity and family history as well as the social and cultural context of her life. Manning Clark and Robert Hughes wrote critically acclaimed histories of Australia. (See alsoAustralian literature.)

Education and Social Welfare

Australia’s generally high standard of living is protected and reinforced by comprehensive social programs. In recent decades some of the government’s social spending has been designed to assist Indigenous groups. Indigenous Australians are generally less well-off than white Australians because of a history of discrimination as well as gaps in income, standards of living, and social opportunities. Other government programs have attempted to help immigrant groups learn English and assimilate into broader Australian society.

Primary and secondary schools

More than 99 percent of Australia’s adults can read and write. However, literacy rates are much lower among some immigrants and minority groups. Australian children are required to attend school between the ages of 6 and 15 or 16. Most of them attend government-operated schools. Nearly a third attend nongovernment schools run by churches (mainly the Roman Catholic Church) or private organizations. The federal, state, and territorial governments grant funds to nongovernment schools. However, the grants do not oblige the schools to admit a broader range of students (unlike similar types of government funding in the United Kingdom and other countries).

The public schools have been free, compulsory, and secular (nonreligious) since the 1870s. Students living in remote areas of the country are reached by missionary schools, correspondence education, or Schools of the Air. The latter broadcasts lessons using radio, satellite, and computer systems. Government schools are usually coeducational, whereas many private schools are for girls or boys only.

The school year begins in late January or early February and ends in mid-December. (The seasons in Australia are opposite those in the Northern Hemisphere.) Students attend class for about 200 days per year. They take a vacation of about six weeks over the summer months, December to February. Three shorter breaks divide the school year into four terms. About three-quarters of Australians aged 25 to 64 have finished secondary school.

Australian authorities have expressed concern about the small number of students taking science and mathematics courses and the need to broaden the curriculum for girls. Another issue is the challenge of integrating children with physical and mental disabilities into local schools. Since one-fifth of the population in the 1990s had a non-English-speaking background, the federal government provided funds for teaching English as a second language.

Universities and technical schools

Australia has more than 40 universities. Post-high-school education is also available through the extensive vocational education and training (VET) sector. It includes private colleges as well as dozens of government-owned TAFE (technical and further education) institutions. More than two-fifths of adult Australians have completed some level of higher education, earning either a university degree or a certificate or diploma from a VET institution. Nearly three-fifths of higher-education students are women. Australia attracts a high number of international students; they make up about a quarter of the enrollment in higher-education institutions.

Toby Hudson

Donaldytong

The first Australian university was founded in Sydney in 1850. In later years universities were built in Melbourne (1853), Adelaide (1874), Hobart (1890), Brisbane (1909), and Perth (1911). The federal government funds most institutions of higher learning so that Australian students pay only a portion of the actual costs. The percentage paid by the student varies depending on the course of study. Australia’s first private university was established in 1989.

Libraries and museums

Robin Smith Photography, New South Wales

Sydney was the first Australian city to get a private library, in 1821. The city had the country’s first public library by 1827. Australia now has nine national and state or territorial libraries and more than 1,500 local libraries and branches. The National Library of Australia in Canberra has the largest holdings of any Australian library. The University of Sydney’s library ranks second. The library of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies has a vast collection of printed, audio, and video materials.

More than 2,000 museums of all sizes operate in the country. The massive Australian Museum was established in Sydney in 1827. It contains a fine collection of Aboriginal artifacts. Sydney is also home to the Australian National Maritime Museum and the SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium. The National Museum of Australia, in Canberra, exhibits objects relating to Australia’s political, social, and cultural history. It has a large collection of Aboriginal bark paintings and stone artifacts. The Australian War Memorial, also in Canberra, displays exhibits about Australia’s military history. The Melbourne Museum is the largest museum complex in the Southern Hemisphere. It features a wide range of cultural and scientific exhibits and includes a children’s museum.

Australia has many art museums. Among the largest are the National Gallery of Australia and the National Portrait Gallery, both in Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Sydney.

Mike Lehmann

There are a number of open-air museums, including Sovereign Hill, a reconstructed gold-mining town in Ballarat, Victoria. Fine specimens of Australian flora can be seen in the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra, the Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney and Melbourne, and Kings Park in Perth.

Scientific research

Most basic scientific research in Australia is conducted in universities. Multinational corporations and government agencies also sponsor research laboratories. The federal government founded the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in 1926. Its aeronautical, chemical, and standards laboratories have aided many Australian industries. For instance, in the mid-1900s its staff discovered processes to make woolen textiles shrink-proof, mothproof, and permanently pressed. This helped save the country’s wool industry from being wiped out by competition from artificial fibers. Its radiophysics laboratory pioneered the use of the interferometer in 1946. By the early 2000s CSIRO had some 4,000 scientists working in the fields of agriculture, mining, energy, manufacturing, environmental sciences, genetics, and biotechnology.

Australia is one of the world’s key astronomical centers, thanks to its political stability, its clear, dry air, and its wide view of the southern skies. The ingenious Mills Cross radio telescopes originated in Australia. The 210-foot (64-meter) dish at Parkes, New South Wales, identified the first known quasars in 1960. One of the world’s largest ensembles of mobile radio telescopes, the Australia Telescope Compact Array, operates at Culgoora, New South Wales. Major optical telescopes in Australia include the Anglo-Australian and UK Schmidt telescopes at Coonabarabran, New South Wales.

Health care

The federal government has provided universal health care since 1984, when it introduced the current Medicare program. This program gives all Australians the right to free public health insurance. Medicare pays for care in public hospitals, prescription drugs, and most of the costs for outpatient medical treatment.

Under this system, no one is forced to seek care at a public hospital. Any Australians (particularly the wealthy) who desire faster treatment or different doctors are at liberty to go outside the government system. Some pay out of their own pockets for private hospitals and privately funded doctors. Others use private health insurance to give themselves those options.

Medicare is partly funded by an addition to income taxes. One of the main challenges to the Medicare program is the aging of the population, which means that a significant portion of Australians will require additional health care in the near future. One of the chief advantages of the program is that more Australians can concentrate on preventive care rather than reactive or emergency care (as is often the case among many poor and middle-class patients in the United States and other countries that lack universal health care).

Australia’s states and territories also provide several health services, including medical care for school children, pregnant women, and some job-related health needs. Some also have dental care plans. In coordination with local governments, states and territories also fund public health services, such as disease control and immunization. Local governments have the most control over garbage collection, water and sanitation systems, and health inspections—services that are fundamental to public health.

For Australians living in the Outback, vast distances have always presented challenges, particularly when they need medical care. For instance, in the early 1900s a stock worker with a spear embedded in his chest was carried in a hammock slung between horses to Oodnadatta, 400 miles (640 kilometers) away. There he waited two weeks for a train to take him 600 miles (970 kilometers) to a hospital in Adelaide.

To address such problems, in 1928 Alfred Traeger invented a pedal-driven radio transmitter and receiver, which most homesteads could afford. He and the director of the Australian Inland Mission, a clergyman named John Flynn, traveled the country, showing settlers how to use the transmitters to call the mission headquarters. In the same year Flynn’s staff established a base at Cloncurry, Queensland, for a “flying doctor” service. This service provides medical care to remote areas via airplane. The first flying doctor was K. St. Vincent Welch. Today the Royal Flying Doctor Service provides 24-hour emergency treatment and annually evacuates tens of thousands of people. In addition, it provides preventive and nonemergency service at more than 10,000 health care clinics. Doctors and nurses see hundreds of thousands of patients at the clinics each year. The service’s members also consult with tens of thousands of patients by phone and radio.

In the 2010s the average life expectancy in Australia reached more than 79 years for males and more than 84 years for females. However, life expectancy among Aboriginal people is generally several years lower. The major causes of death among all Australians are diseases of the circulatory system, cancers, dementia, and respiratory diseases.

Labor conditions and welfare

Trade unions have long been a major force in Australian life, pressing for laws and reforms that improve workers’ pay and benefits. Nearly a quarter of workers are members of unions. As part of this long legacy of trade unionism, the Australian government guarantees that all workers are insured against injury, permanent disability, and death. Australia’s minimum wage ranks among the highest in the world. The idea that employees must be paid enough to support a family—in other words, a “living wage”—was established by the landmark Harvester judgment of 1907. (For more on the Harvester judgment, see below.)

The nonworking population is also protected by various health insurance and retirement plans. However, these and other social programs have often been at the center of political fights between members of Parliament, particularly when conservative legislators have sought to limit government spending.

Australia has numerous welfare organizations that complement the government’s social services. They include the Australian Red Cross, the Smith Family, the Salvation Army, the St. Vincent de Paul Society (Roman Catholic), the Brotherhood of St. Laurence (Anglican), and St. John Ambulance Australia. Additional organizations provide social, recreational, and spiritual programs for the youth of Australia. In 1908, just one year after Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts in England, the group was established in Australia.

Women’s rights

John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland Neg: 194026

John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland Neg: 36662

Australian society was long dominated by men who did not respect the rights of women. However, some women and men worked to change things. In the 1800s, feminist reformers began to promote the idea that women should have economic and political rights equal to those of men. In 1902 Australia granted women (except Aboriginal women in some states) suffrage (the right to vote) in national elections and the right to stand for Parliament. This was just a decade after New Zealand had passed similar legislation and 18 years before women in the United States could vote. Women could vote in all Australian state elections by 1909. Equal-opportunity legislation has been promoted by the Australian Federation of Women Voters, from 1921, and the Women’s Electoral Lobby, from 1972.

Though woman suffrage came early to Australia, women faced a long struggle for equality in employment. The Commonwealth Public Service Act of 1902 stated that every female officer was “deemed to have retired from the Commonwealth Service upon her marriage.” For more than 60 years the so-called “marriage bar” prevented married women from holding permanent positions in public service. They could take only temporary positions. That limited not only their opportunities for career advancement but also their ability to influence public policy. The marriage bar was finally lifted in 1966.

As more women entered the workforce following World War II, equal pay became an issue of growing concern. In the 1960s, Australian law allowed employers to pay women 25 percent less than they paid men for the same work. In 1972 a court decision required employers to pay women “equal pay for work of equal value.” Another landmark came in 1984 when Parliament passed the Sex Discrimination Act, which banned discrimination on the basis of sex, marital status, or pregnancy.

Despite decades of progress, Australian women continue to face inequality in the workplace. The “pay gap” between men and women is still significant, in some cases exceeding the gap that existed in the 1960s. For example, men who worked in financial and insurance services in 2017 made about 30 percent more money than their female counterparts.

Increasing numbers of women have been elected to local government councils as well as positions in the state, territorial, and federal governments. Although Australians still face gender-based discrimination, women’s rights have captured the attention of many in the business and political sectors, as well as in many households.

Status of Indigenous Australians

Since the 1960s, Australia has made progress in addressing the history of discrimination against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. A turning point in the recognition of Indigenous rights came in 1967. In that year more than 90 percent of Australian voters chose in a national referendum to give the federal government the power to make laws for Indigenous peoples. The vote showed widespread support for addressing the inequalities affecting Indigenous Australians. This defining moment paved the way for other milestones in the fight for justice. Among the most notable was the recognition of native land title by the High Court in the “Mabo decision” of 1992. In 1997 the Australian Human Rights Commission issued a report on the separation of Indigenous children from their families—now referred to as the Stolen Generations. In 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a formal apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples for abusive government policies of the past. Despite these positive steps, however, Indigenous Australians continue to face discrimination and disadvantages in many areas.

The 2016 Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage (OID) report, published by the Australian government’s Productivity Commission, is considered to be the most comprehensive study of Indigenous well-being in contemporary Australia. The report indicated that, on average, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are worse off than non-Indigenous people in such areas as health, education, and employment. According to the report, mental health problems, substance abuse, and imprisonment increased among Indigenous Australians in the early 21st century. The rate of hospitalization for self-harm rose by 56 percent between 2004 and 2015.

The significant health disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians continues to be a major concern despite government commitments to address the situation. Indigenous peoples experience high rates of cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and diabetes. These conditions are often left untreated because of reduced access to health care. Furthermore, research indicates that three out of four Indigenous people have routinely experienced racism when seeking health care.

Statistics help illustrate the continuing challenge to achieving equality in health in Australia. Although the infant mortality rate among Indigenous Australians has improved significantly in recent years, it was still 1.7 times the non-Indigenous rate during the period of 2008–12. The health gap is also evident in life expectancy. In 2010–12 the estimated life expectancy for Indigenous males was 10.6 years less than that for non-Indigenous males. The difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous females was slightly lower, at 9.5 years.

In education, Indigenous children lag behind non-Indigenous children in attendance and attainment. The attendance rate for Indigenous students is lower than that of non-Indigenous students throughout years 1–10, with the gap growing in the later years. Indigenous children in remote areas attend school at a lower rate than those who live closer to cities or towns. The number of Indigenous 20- to 24-year-olds who completed year 12 or equivalent increased from about 45 percent in 2008 to about 62 percent in 2014–15. Despite this progress, however, a significant achievement gap remained, as about 86 percent of non-Indigenous students of the same age had reached that level in 2014–15.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have also faced significant inequalities in employment. They participate in the workforce at a much lower rate than non-Indigenous Australians do. Poor health and lower education levels have contributed to this disparity. So have limited job opportunities in remote areas where many Indigenous Australians live. Additionally, many Indigenous Australians have faced discrimination when applying for jobs as well as in the workplace. Because of the importance of employment to economic independence and overall well-being, the government has created a number of programs to increase employment rates and job retention among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. These programs have helped to improve Indigenous employment rates since the 1990s.

Urbanization and Major Cities

Cities and towns account for some 90 percent of Australia’s population. A number of geographic and economic factors have advanced the urbanization of Australia. The hot, dry climate and the lack of arable land have discouraged settlement over much of the country. From the start of European settlement people have clustered along the coasts, where the climate is more moderate and conditions are generally more livable. A lack of transportation options has also limited settlement in the interior.

The urbanization of Australia has had both benefits and downsides. The concentration of people and industry in urban areas brought economic growth as Australia’s economy expanded beyond agriculture and mining. Large cities have grown even more vital to Australia’s economy as it has shifted toward services. However, urbanization has also presented new challenges. The growing populations and sprawling suburbs of the cities have increased the difficulty and cost of providing services to residents. In addition, the concentration of service industries and jobs in cities has been accompanied by dwindling economic opportunities outside the cities.

The three largest Australian cities—Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane—are located on the eastern and southeastern coasts. Together their metropolitan areas account for nearly half of the country’s total population. The next largest cities are also coastal, including Perth in the southwest and Adelaide in the south. Canberra, the capital and a midsize population center, is located a short distance inland. These major cities resemble those of North America in many ways, including their patterns of automobile and pedestrian traffic and their rapidly growing suburbs. Many central business districts are marked by glass-walled high-rises, parking garages, and teeming streets.

Canberra, of the Australian Capital Territory, is the federal capital of Australia. It is the only one of Australia’s major cities not located on a coast. It is situated in the Eastern Highlands roughly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne—a location chosen specifically to balance the power between those two great population centers. Although it is not one of Australia’s largest cities in terms of population, Canberra is a major cultural and service center. Of course, it is also central to national politics. Canberra is a well-planned national capital and a monumental garden city.

Sydney, the state capital of New South Wales, is home to Australia’s largest population. It has a strong, diverse economy. Sydney has a large service sector and factories that produce foods and beverages, transport equipment, chemicals, publications, and many other goods. The most popular images of the city show the world-famous Sydney Opera House, designed by Jørn Utzon and built from 1957 to 1973. Its soaring white exterior is clearly visible against the backdrop of the picturesque harbor.

Melbourne, the state capital of Victoria, is Australia’s second largest city in terms of population. However, it has always vied with Sydney in terms of size, culture, and influence. Also a major service and manufacturing center, Melbourne’s industries include engineering, metal processing, clothing and textile manufacture, and more. Melbourne has several world-class sports facilities, including the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Melbourne & Olympic Parks, the tennis courts of which host the Australian Open. The annual Melbourne Cup is Australia’s most popular horse race and the occasion of a local holiday.

The metropolitan areas of Brisbane and Perth each have more than 2 million people, and the population of Greater Adelaide exceeds 1.3 million. Brisbane is the state capital and major port of Queensland. Just south-southeast of its urbanized area is another of Australia’s larger cities, Gold Coast, a major resort center. Perth, the state capital of Western Australia, is a transportation hub and industrial center. It serves a vast hinterland of agricultural and mining interests. Adelaide is the state capital of South Australia. In addition to its industries and services, it is a major transportation center between Victoria (and Melbourne) to the southeast and Australia’s interior. Among Australia’s other large and midsize cities are Newcastle, a major industrial center in New South Wales; Wollongong, on the coast just south of Sydney; Hobart, the capital of Tasmania; Cairns, in northern Queensland; and Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, on the tropical northwest coast.

Economy

Australia has a free-market economy based on services, manufacturing, mining, and agriculture. It is widely classified as one of the world’s most developed countries. Its gross domestic product (GDP) is on a par with western European and North American economies, particularly when comparing income per capita (per person). Agriculture, mining, and manufacturing are the traditional bases for Australia’s economic strength. However, services now generate about three-fourths of the country’s GDP. Foreign trade is a particularly important part of the service sector.

Among Australia’s great economic advantages are its sizable reserves of metals, fossil fuels, and other natural resources. Its location in both tropical and temperate climate zones is also beneficial. Other boons are its diversified economy (not having to depend on any single group of exports) and its generally well-trained and educated workforce. Among the major economic challenges is unemployment caused by multinational corporations’ closing local factories in order to increase profits by moving overseas. Other challenges include the limited size of Australia’s domestic market (making overseas trade a necessity) and fluctuations in the demand for exports. In addition, great distances separate the island continent from Asian, European, and North American markets.

Agriculture, Fishing, and Forestry

Australia’s farm products are often in demand in North America, Asia, and Europe because they are harvested during the Northern Hemisphere’s “off-season” of winter and spring—that is, during Australia’s summer and fall. Agriculture, fishing, and forestry account for less than 3 percent of the Australian labor force and GDP. However, they are still significant to the economy. In addition, these primary economic activities are symbolically important to a country that prides itself on its vast spaces, abundant resources, and steadfast settlers. Indeed, many of the country’s stock workers and farmers—as well as its miners and hunters—bear at least some resemblance to the popular stereotype of the Australian adventurer (even without the crocodile wrestling). On the cattle and sheep stations of the Outback in particular, self-reliance and determination are survival traits. This is true even when conveniences such as televisions, refrigerators, Internet service, and electrical generators are only a day’s drive—or several days’ walk—away.

Livestock

Australians raise large numbers of cattle and sheep. Poultry (mainly chickens) has become increasingly important. More than half of Australia’s land area is pasture, much of it on extensive cattle and sheep stations in the northern, eastern, and central parts of the country. Some of the stations are so vast that helicopters are used to herd the animals. Stock workers also use motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), and sheepdogs for herding purposes, along with the occasional horse.

About half of Australia’s more than 25 million cattle are raised in Queensland. Many of the state’s cattle graze in the tropical savannas of the north. Significant numbers are also raised farther south, where they depend on water from the (underground) aquifer called the Great Artesian Basin. New South Wales and Victoria also have large beef-cattle herds. In 1933 Brahman cattle were crossed with British breeds to produce a strain of Australian cattle more resistant to heat and ticks. Since then, other breeds have been developed. At various times cattle have escaped their stations and contributed to the growth of feral (wild) herds. These herds roam the semiarid landscape, trampling vegetation and depleting scarce water supplies. The cattle industry is a valuable source of exports, in terms of both processed beef and live animals.

A few million dairy cattle are concentrated in the southeast, especially in Victoria, and around urban centers elsewhere. Australia is a major world exporter of dairy products, selling to Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and China, among other countries.

The grazing lands in Australia’s temperate south are more suitable to raising sheep than the land in the tropical north. Australia has some 70 million sheep—a large number, but down significantly from 170 million in 1990. Australia is the world’s leading producer of wool. The vast majority of exported wool is sold in its greasy natural state. Much of it is high-quality wool from Merino sheep. The main consumer of Australian wool is China, followed by India and Italy.

Australia is also a major exporter of lamb, mutton, and live sheep. Major markets for lamb and mutton include the United States, China, and the Middle East. Each year several million live sheep are crowded onto disease-ridden ships bound mainly for Muslim countries of the Middle East, where they undergo ceremonial slaughter. Despite opposition from animal-rights groups, live-animal exports have remained a lucrative part of the livestock industry.

Poultry has made inroads into the Australian diet at the expense of beef and lamb. However, fewer chickens are being raised in traditional farmyards, and many seldom see the light of day. The reason for this shift away from natural conditions is the growth of factory farms. As in the United States, factory farming has largely replaced small-farm production of poultry, especially in the case of chickens raised for meat. Factory farming has also greatly affected the raising of chickens for eggs. The number of egg farms in Australia declined from about 11,000 in the late 1960s to some 300 in the 2010s. In contrast to chicken-meat farming, however, egg farming is more evenly distributed between small farms and large-scale operations. In response to pressure from animal-welfare groups, growing numbers of egg producers adopted free-range and barn-based production methods in the early 2000s.

Crops

Australia’s main crops include wheat, barley, canola, cotton, sugarcane, fruits, and vegetables. Crops of somewhat lesser value to the economy include sorghum, oats, rice, pulses, and corn (maize). Farmers have placed only a tiny percentage of the land under permanent cultivation, partly with the help of irrigation and wells drawing huge volumes of water from the Great Artesian Basin.

Wheat is Australia’s primary crop, both for Australian consumption and for export. Australia contributes about 10 to 15 percent of the world’s wheat exports. Wheat is planted in every state, especially in the southeast and southwest. In most years about three-fourths of the wheat crop is exported, mostly to Southeast Asia, China, and the Middle East.

Sugar is the second major export crop. Australia is one of the world’s leading exporters of sugar. Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, and Japan are major buyers. Australia’s sugar-related products include molasses and bagasse, a fibrous plant residue used as fuel. Commercial sugar cultivation began in the 1860s near Brisbane. It has since spread along the Queensland coast as far north as Cairns.

Horticulture—the growing of garden crops—makes a valuable contribution to Australian agriculture. It includes fruits, nuts, vegetables, and ornamental crops such as cut flowers. Most of the products are sold within Australia, but some are exported. Farmers raise tropical fruits such as bananas, mangoes, avocados, and oranges as well as temperate fruits such as apples, pears, and grapes. Vegetables include asparagus, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and onions. Macadamia nuts are sold throughout the world.

Australia ranks among the top 10 wine-producing countries in the world. Its wines are internationally respected and are exported to more than 100 countries, including China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Much of the wine is also sold in Australia. Wine is produced in many areas of the country but is most important in the south. The industry became economically significant only in the 1950s. Production boomed in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Challenges to food production

Agriculture is one of Australia’s most efficient and technologically advanced industries. Agricultural production is high enough that Australian farmers provide more than 90 percent of the food consumed in Australia while still allowing the country to be a major food exporter. Australian farmers have achieved this success despite facing significant challenges. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth and has some of the world’s oldest, shallowest, and most weathered soil. Farmers have had to adapt to these conditions by developing unique and efficient farming techniques. They have been aided by technological advances that have increased agricultural production even as the number of agricultural workers has declined. Nevertheless, Australian agriculture is still vulnerable to environmental changes that have already had a negative impact on production. Climate change due to global warming, water scarcity, and land degradation—a decline in the agricultural value of land—are serious concerns. These problems threaten the future of Australian food production.

Australia is predicted to be one of the most negatively affected regions in terms of agricultural production as a result of climate change. Scientists believe that extreme weather events such as heat waves, severe droughts, and cyclones will become more frequent or more intense. Australia has already seen the impact that such weather events can have. In 2006, for example, Cyclone Larry decimated 90 percent of North Queensland’s banana crop. Banana prices increased by 500 percent. Similarly, the 2009 heat wave in southeastern Australia devastated fruit crops in the state of Victoria. Extreme heat and drought have also reduced cattle herds, causing production declines and huge losses for farmers.

More-frequent heat waves and droughts will put additional strain on Australia’s limited water resources. Rainfall is generally low and varies significantly from year to year. Yet despite the limited availability of water, Australia has the highest per capita water consumption in the world. About 70 percent of Australia’s water consumption is used to support agriculture. Rainfall in southern Australia has declined over the last two decades and is expected to continue to decrease. This region has some of Australia’s most important agricultural areas. One is the Murray-Darling Basin, where farmers produce about one-third of the country’s food supply. The decline in water availability has already affected—and will continue to affect—food production in the Murray-Darling Basin, particularly of irrigation-dependent crops such as rice and other grains.

Since the time that European settlement of Australia began, people have cleared forests, woodlands, and grasslands to make room for agriculture, industry, and the building of cities. Australia continues to clear land at a rate that ranks among the highest in the world. The environmental impact of land clearing on agriculture is an ongoing problem for food productivity. The removal of natural vegetation makes the soil more vulnerable to erosion and devastates the agricultural value of the land. Land clearing is the leading cause of soil salinity—the buildup of salt in the soil. On cleared land, groundwater that was once taken up by native plants rises to the surface, bringing underground salt with it. The salt greatly reduces the fertility of Australia’s already limited arable land. The clearing of native vegetation also affects agriculture by altering natural ecosystems, which allows weeds and animal pests (such as rabbits) to invade farming areas. In addition, scientists have found that the removal of native plants might increase the length and severity of droughts.

Land degradation has become a major problem threatening food productivity in Australia. To address this concern, federal and state governments have worked with farming communities to encourage more-sustainable agricultural practices. The Australian government has introduced land-clearing controls and provided financial assistance to farmers who use sustainable methods.

Fishing

Australia’s small fishing industry exports rock lobsters, abalone, tuna, and prawns. China (including Hong Kong), Vietnam, Japan, and the United States are important markets for Australian fish and related products.

The fishing industry seems limited when compared with the continent’s vast coastal circumference of 23,000 miles (37,000 kilometers). The surrounding waters are a habitat for thousands of varieties of fish. Yet many of the fish are hidden within the mazes of the Great Barrier Reef, where large-scale fishing would be environmentally disastrous. In addition, Australia’s continental shelf is generally too narrow for extensive trawling. The relatively warm surrounding oceans lack the vast shoals of fish found in colder, shallower waters. The main fishing grounds are along the northeastern, southeastern, and southwestern coasts. Freshwater fishing is negligible because of Australia’s aridity. Barramundi (giant perch) are caught in estuaries.

Oysters are a traditional food of Aboriginal peoples, whose shell middens, or refuse dumps, dot the coast. The larger Pacific oyster was introduced from Japan in 1947 and is cultivated mainly in Tasmania. From about 1860, pearl divers sought natural pearls from the mother-of-pearl shell. But today the industry is based on the artificial culture of pearls, which are exported. Japanese companies have a joint interest in these pearl farms.

Forestry

A relatively small area of the continent consists of forests suitable for large-scale timber production. The forests are found in areas of high and regular rainfall in the Eastern Highlands, in Tasmania, and in the southwest. Australia produces much of the wood that it uses for construction, pulp, and other needs. However, it has been unable to keep up with increasing demand, leading to a greater reliance on imports. Most of the timber harvested is hardwood, mainly from eucalyptus.

Building timbers are obtained in Victoria from alpine ash and mountain ash. In New South Wales and Queensland, blackbutt, spotted gum, blue gum, and ironbark eucalyptus are used. In Western Australia, building timbers come from jarrah and karri, another type of eucalyptus. Many commercially planted forests have been planted with softwoods such as California radiata pine. Tasmania’s vast forests have long been prized locations for logging camps and pulp mills. However, environmental groups have worked to limit clear-cutting and other particularly harmful forestry practices there. About half of Tasmania’s native forests are now protected by national parks, conservation areas, and reserves.

Industry

Industry—including mining, manufacturing, construction, and public utilities—accounts for about one-fourth of Australia’s GDP and one-fifth of its jobs. Mining helped drive European exploration and settlement of Australia in the 1800s. It continues to play a vital role in the economy today. Manufacturing reached its peak in 1959–60, when it contributed about one-third of the GDP. Manufacturing has since declined sharply in terms of both production and employment.

Mining and energy

Exports provided by the mining industry bring in more than one-third—and, in some years, as much as half—of Australia’s export dollars. Australia is a leading world producer of iron ore, coal, bauxite (the main ore of aluminum), copper, uranium, gold, diamonds, and liquefied natural gas (LNG). The country also produces petroleum, silver, nickel, manganese ore, lead, and mineral sands (rutile, ilmenite, and zircon). Also present are myriad lesser minerals, from tin and sapphires to the world’s largest concentration of opals. China, Japan, South Korea, and India are among the major consumers of Australian minerals.

As in other countries, mines can bring enormous economic benefits as well as severe risks for the environment (mainly in the pollution of rivers and air). Mining can also be hazardous to human health, with miners at risk for contracting such diseases as pneumoconiosis and mesothelioma. Many Australian environmentalists and community activists have worked to have the pollution from mining operations monitored and reduced, with varying degrees of success.

Much of the iron ore extracted from the country’s largest mineral reserves, the enormous open-pit mines of Western Australia, is destined for the factories of China and, to a lesser extent, Japan and South Korea. Queensland’s Mount Isa has been the site of important silver, lead, zinc, and copper production since 1923. Many other silver, gold, copper, lead, and gem mines are scattered around the mainland and Tasmania.

Australia is a major world producer of bauxite; its derivative, alumina; and their end product, aluminum. The Alcoa company began mining bauxite in 1963 at Jarrahdale, near Perth in the southwest. Mines were soon established at richer deposits in the north on the Gulf of Carpentaria, on or alongside Aboriginal lands. One of the world’s largest alumina refineries is located in Gladstone, Queensland.

Coal was discovered at Newcastle in 1793 and has been exported since 1800. However, coal production barely met domestic consumption until 1965. Although it is not the world’s biggest producer, Australia has exported more coal than any other country since 1985. At times, almost half of those shipments went to Japan, though China, India, and South Korea have also become major markets. The richest deposits of black, or bituminous, coal are found in the Sydney Basin and in the Bowen Basin of Queensland. In the Sydney Basin, both underground and open-pit mines operate. In the Bowen Basin, open-pit mines predominate. Both locations are close to coastal ports. Less-volatile brown coal, or lignite, is cut only in Victoria. It is burned to generate most of that state’s electric power.

Before 1965, the country depended almost entirely on imports of crude oil and petroleum products. Following numerous fossil-fuel discoveries, however, Australia has become self-sufficient in natural gas. It also produces a large share of the petroleum that its factories and automobiles burn. The country’s first commercial oil field at Moonie in Queensland began operating only in 1961. Drilling began as late as 1964 in the offshore Bass Strait, from which a large percentage of the country’s oil is now pumped. Oil is also produced off the coast of Western Australia at Barrow Island. In the early 21st century, declining oil production coupled with growing domestic demand increased Australia’s reliance on oil imports. During the same period, however, the country produced and exported growing quantities of LNG.

Some of the world’s largest known uranium reserves have been mined in Australia since 1944. Most of the known deposits are in the Alligator Rivers area of the Northern Territory and in South Australia. Australia exports uranium oxide, sometimes called yellowcake, only to countries with which it has concluded a nuclear safeguards agreement. The agreement is required because uranium is used in nuclear weapons as well as in nuclear reactors. Much of the uranium in the Northern Territory is found on Aboriginal lands, and development has been challenged throughout the years by Aboriginal and environmental groups. Today, Aboriginal peoples receive royalties on sales of uranium mined in the Northern Territory.

More than four-fifths of the country’s electricity is produced by the burning of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, or fuel oil). The rest is produced using renewable sources, mainly hydroelectricity (waterpower) and wind power. Australia has no nuclear power stations. The majority of electricity is used by industries and urban residents in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and Western Australia.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing’s contribution to the economy has fallen to less than one-tenth of the gross domestic product and of the jobs in the workforce. New South Wales and Victoria have the greatest share of the country’s manufacturing jobs, followed by Queensland. Australia’s factories turn out food and beverages, machinery, metal products, chemicals, wood and paper products, printed and recorded media, textiles, and other products.

David Moore/Black Star

Australia’s mining industries spurred the growth of many manufacturing businesses, beginning with those that make iron and steel products from iron ore. The main steel-producing center was at Newcastle, New South Wales, where the huge mining company BHP began production in 1915. The plant thrived for decades until, faced with competition from foreign steelmakers, BHP shut it down in 1999. The steel industry continued to struggle in the first decades of the 21st century.

In 1917 Australian factories began to produce automobile parts, which were assembled on imported chassis (frames). The first completely Australian-made vehicle was produced by General Motors Holden and began rolling off the Fishermans Bend production line in 1948. It racked up its millionth sale in 1962. GM Holden and other American- and Japanese-owned car companies employed tens of thousands of Australians each year. However, the lure of cheaper labor led them to move their factories to Thailand and other Asian countries in the 2000s. In 2016–17 Australia’s last three car manufacturers—GM Holden, Ford, and Toyota—closed their factories in the country.

The trend of companies moving their manufacturing operations to Asia has affected other Australian industries, including publishing and textiles. In response, some Australian companies have sought to refocus their efforts away from mass-produced items and toward high-quality, more-specialized products. This approach has encouraged research and innovation in the sector.

Services

The largest component of the Australian economy is the service sector. It encompasses a wide range of activities, including finance and insurance, education, health care, publishing, radio and television, tourism, restaurants, trade, and entertainment. Financial and insurance services is the largest of these industries in its share of the GDP. Health care and retail trade are the leading sources of employment. Many government activities are also regarded as part of the service sector, though they are described in a different section of this article.

The government controlled many elements of Australia’s banks and financial services until the 1980s, when it deregulated the financial system. As a result, Australian banks became an unprotected part of the global market. They could be bought, sold, and operated with little government oversight. Several foreign banks began to operate in Australia, and some Australian banks launched overseas offices. The Australian Stock Exchange Limited was formed in 1987 from six preexisting exchanges. It is now known as the ASX Group.

Tourism is a growing industry in Australia. The leading sources of overseas visitors are New Zealand and China, reflecting a surge in Chinese tourism in the early 21st century. Large numbers of tourists also arrive from the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and India. The national tourism-promotion agency, Tourism Australia, advertises the country as uncongested, unpolluted, friendly, climatically superb, and politically stable. There are major tourist attractions in every part of Australia, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Sydney Opera House and from the Aboriginal cave paintings of Uluru/Ayers Rock to the rainforests of Queensland.

The development of retailing in Australia has imitated the Anglo-American pattern and includes department stores, discount chains, supermarkets, and suburban malls. As car ownership increased, malls were built farther out from cities.

Foreign trade is extremely important to Australia’s economy. Leading exports include iron ore, coal, gold, pearls, metal products, chemicals, natural gas, aluminum ores, meat, and wheat. Australia’s top trading partner for both imports and exports is China. Other important partners include the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, New Zealand, Thailand, Malaysia, and Germany. Australia is an active participant in the World Trade Organization and in agreements that promote lower tariffs (taxes on imports) and fewer restrictive quotas.

Transportation and Communication

Australians rely heavily on automobiles. Agricultural and industrial centers are widely spread out, as are suburban residential areas. Among workers and students 18 years and older, seven out of 10 people commute in privately owned vehicles (often alone, without passengers). Only one out of 10 people commutes on public transportation (train, bus, tram, or ferry), mainly because of a lack of service or scheduling inconveniences. Public-transportation use is highest in the larger cities and among younger Australians.

Roads carry about one-third of the freight moved within Australia. The earliest road network beyond Sydney reached the inland provincial city of Bathurst by 1815. The Hume Highway from Sydney to Melbourne, built soon afterward, remains one of Australia’s most traveled roadways. Even busier is the Pacific Highway, which connects Sydney and Brisbane. Owing to the vast distances in the Outback, only about 40 percent of the country’s roads are paved.

About half of Australia’s domestic freight, consisting mostly of iron ore and coal, is carried by rail. Railroads were built in several parts of Australia between 1854, when a line connected Melbourne and Port Melbourne, and 1871, when the inland wheat belts were being developed. However, Australia’s various colonies disagreed on the types of rail construction and service to be provided. This resulted in three different rail gauges (widths) being used in different areas. It took until 1970 to standardize one continuous line between Perth and Brisbane, along which the Indian Pacific passenger train now travels. It crosses the Nullarbor Plain on the longest straight stretch of rail track in the world, at 300 miles (480 kilometers) long.

The total length of track in Australia declined after World War II owing to a lack of maintenance. Rebuilding and new construction brought the mileage of government-owned track up to about 23,000 miles (37,000 kilometers) by the 2010s. This does not include private lines owned by mines and other companies that convey iron ore, sugar, coal, and other goods to the nearest ports. The government-owned Australian Rail Track Corporation manages 5,300 miles (8,500 kilometers) of track across five states. Trams, or streetcars, served the larger cities until buses replaced them by the 1960s—except in Melbourne, which kept its extensive tram system intact. Sydney brought back trams in 1997 with the opening of a new light-rail system. Gold Coast opened Queensland’s first light-rail line in 2014.

Australia’s busiest ports are those that export coal and iron ore. They are Port Hedland and Dampier in Western Australia, Hay Point and Gladstone in Queensland, and Newcastle in New South Wales. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Fremantle are also major ports. River transport is negligible in a land beset by sand-clogged channels and with few navigable streams.

Air travel is a lifeline between Australia and the world. It is also indispensable for domestic travel. Qantas, the largest airline, was founded in 1920 as the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited. The federal government took over Qantas in 1947. By the 1960s, airlines had almost completely replaced shipping companies for long-distance passengers.

Australia is highly developed in terms of information and communications technology. Far more cell phones are in use than landline phones, and Australians are some of the world’s most frequent users of the Internet. More than four-fifths of Australian households have personal computers and Internet access. The Telstra Corporation is Australia’s largest telecommunications company.

Regular radio broadcasts started in 1923 using a “sealed-set” system. In this system, listeners could tune in only to preprogrammed stations by subscribing to Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd. and paying a license fee to the federal government. A rival, advertising-based service began in 1925. Network radio was introduced in 1930, and the first frequency modulation (FM) stations were licensed in 1980. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) was established in 1932. It was reconstituted as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1983. The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) provides radio and television programs, including international news, for ethnic minorities.

Television transmission began in Sydney in 1956, in all other state capitals by 1960, and in Canberra and the major provincial centers by 1964. Digital TV broadcasts came to Australia’s metropolitan areas in 2001.

Australians are among the most avid newspaper readers in the world. Their first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, began publication in 1803. There are now two national dailies and hundreds of other newspapers. A few labor-oriented (leftist or unionist) newspapers survived until World War II. However, most of the corporate-owned media today is highly conservative. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation now controls more than two-thirds of daily newspaper circulation.

Government

Australia is a parliamentary democracy. It is generally modeled on the British, or Westminster, system—but with a few differences. In Australia the power of Parliament is limited by a written constitution, so that the three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—all share power. Australia also has a three-tiered system of federal, state, and local governments that differs from the British mode in that it has some features in common with the United States federal system. The Australian federal government is largely funded through income taxes, which it alone has the right to collect.

The Executive Branch

The prime minister is the actual leader of the government. However, Australia is officially a constitutional monarchy. This means that the British monarch nominally holds executive power. The monarch consults with the prime minister before nominating a governor-general, which is a largely ceremonial post. The governor-general must perform nearly all the duties of the office (such as appointing government ministers) only “on the advice of” the prime minister. This means that the prime minister typically directs the actions of the governor-general.

The political party (or coalition of parties) that has won election to a majority of seats in the House of Representatives (the lower house of Parliament) selects the country’s prime minister from among its members. The prime minister nominates a cabinet of ministers, chosen from the members of Parliament. The governor-general then officially appoints the ministers. The ministers lead specific government agencies that deal with education, social welfare, the treasury (exchequer), defense, and other matters of national importance. Unlike the heads of United States government agencies, ministers must be elected members of Parliament. They are thus answerable to both Parliament and the public.

The Australian public service, or bureaucracy, is the backbone of the national government. Many of its members dedicate their careers to civil service. Senior public servants are appointed as nonpolitical permanent heads of government departments. This ensures continuity of technical and professional expertise during political transitions.

The Legislative Branch

The federal Parliament is bicameral—that is, consisting of two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives. Their members are all popularly elected. The Senate has 76 members: 12 from each of the six states and two each from the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. The state members serve six-year terms, while the territory members serve three-year terms. Half of the state members are elected every three years, at the same time that territory members are elected. The House of Representatives has 150 members, including at least five from each state. House members serve terms of up to three years.

The constitution permits either house of Parliament to introduce legislation (in the form of bills). However, only the House of Representatives may introduce most spending and taxation bills. Both houses must approve all bills before they become law. The constitution may be altered by referendum if approved by a majority of voters nationally and by majorities in four out of the six states. Only eight of 44 referendums have succeeded.

Democracy is seen in action during the question-and-answer periods of Parliament, which occur each day that that body meets. During these periods, individual members of Parliament (MPs) may ask questions of government ministers, including the prime minister. By law, the ministers must reply. But when answers are not satisfactory to the opposition political parties, their MPs are known to heckle, clap, laugh, and demand that even more answers be put forward. Thus, every government leader must be ready to deal with public criticism when Parliament is in session. These interactive question sessions have been described as “rough and tumble.” Nevertheless, they are controlled by parliamentary rules, such as the alternating between questions from government MPs and questions from opposition MPs.

The Judicial Branch

The High Court of Australia is at the top of the judiciary system. Its chief justice and six other justices are appointed to serve on the court until the age of 70. The High Court is responsible for interpreting the constitution. It is the final arbiter of Australian law, though this was not always the case. The High Court’s decisions have increased the power of the federal government in such areas as education, health, housing, transport, the environment, aviation, trade practices, and international-treaty obligations. The lower Federal Court hears cases involving labor law, bankruptcy, taxation, and trade practices. The Family Court of Australia is responsible for settling disputes over marriage and offspring (except in Western Australia, where the state family court handles such matters).

The highest state courts are the state supreme courts. They hear the most-serious criminal cases, such as those involving murder or treason. The state supreme courts also deal with civil disputes involving large sums of money. They preside over appeals from lower state courts. Each state except Tasmania has a district court (called the county court in Victoria) that handles less-serious criminal offenses and smaller civil claims. The magistrates court (called the local court in New South Wales) has jurisdiction over minor crimes and civil cases.

State and Local Government

Each of the six states has a two-house parliament except Queensland, where the upper house was abolished in 1922. In state parliaments the right to govern is held by the political party, or coalition of political parties, with the most representatives in the lower house. The leader of the majority party automatically becomes the premier, who heads the state government. More than 800 urban municipalities and rural shires have local governments. Because income taxes are collected only at the federal level, state and local governments often petition the national government for more funds.

Elections and Political Parties

State Library of South Australia, B 70647

Australia has led the world in many phases of electoral reform, though it did not grant full voting rights to Aboriginal people until the 1960s. The secret ballot, universally known as the Australian ballot, was first used in Victoria in 1856. The South Australian government was the first in the world to adopt suffrage (voting rights) for all adult males (1856). It granted women the right to vote in 1894. Soon after, Australia became the second country—after New Zealand—to enfranchise women, in 1902.

Voting is required for all Australian citizens aged 18 years and older. Those who fail to vote in an election may be fined. Normally, voter turnout exceeds 90 percent. However, a small percentage of the votes cast are informal, or intentionally invalid. The federal government in 1918 adopted a preferential voting system, in which voters number the candidates in order of preference on the ballot. This helps resolve elections without resorting to second rounds of balloting when the vote count is close. Seats in the legislatures are filled by proportional representation, in which the political parties divide the seats according to the number of votes they receive.

The ALP has been the left-wing party of reform as well as the workers’ party. It arose as Australia’s first political party in 1891 after strikes failed to secure better working conditions. In its early years the ALP advocated electoral reforms, improvements in the workplace, and government aid to agriculture and education. The party also supported the White Australia Policy, which was officially abandoned in the mid-1970s.

The Country Party was formed in 1920 to promote the interests of farmers and rural communities. It broadened its base and changed its name to the National Party in 1982. The Liberal Party, founded in 1944, is largely made up of people who would be called conservatives in the United States. (In European and Australian history, liberal is a term that refers to businesses operating “liberally”—that is, free of most government oversight, labor and environmental laws, and taxes.)

In the early 21st century, smaller parties drew support away from the main parties, sometimes collectively winning more than one-fifth of the vote. The minor parties were led by the Australian Greens, an environmentalist party formed by the union of state-based Green parties in 1992. A party must garner at least 4 percent of the vote in order to receive public funding for its campaigns.

Law Enforcement

Each state and the Northern Territory has its own police force. Local communities rely on the district offices of state patrols. Until 1833, soldiers supervising convicts performed police duties. For the remainder of the 19th century, urban police units were supplemented by the Native Police force (also known by the racialized name “blacktrackers”) and mounted troopers. These forces patrolled remote areas where bushrangers, escaped convicts, and violent miners provoked disorder. Sadly, many police also contributed to the strict government control and repression of Aboriginal populations.

The Australian Federal Police was created in 1979 from the older Commonwealth Police. It provides police services to the Australian Capital Territory and deals with federal drug trafficking, organized crime, and large-scale fraud. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) operates much like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. It is responsible for helping to protect Australia against serious security threats, including terrorism. The Australian Border Force (ABF) was formed in 2015 to serve as the main federal agency in charge of protecting the country’s borders.

The Military

A minister in the executive branch of government leads the Department of Defence. It oversees the Australian military, officially known as the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The ADF includes the army, navy, and air force. The Department of Defence sets policy for the military branches and manages their finances, including major purchases of military equipment.

The ADF is technologically advanced and well trained. It is also one of the country’s largest employers, with some 60,000 full-time personnel, half of whom are in the army. The ADF also employs about 20,000 reserve troops. Although this may sound like a large force, it is far smaller than the militaries of many countries of comparable population—and it is particularly notable given the large area that the ADF is potentially responsible for defending.

In addition to training for war, the ADF patrols the northern coast to prevent smuggling and illegal boat arrivals. Australia has participated in United Nations peacekeeping missions and international policing efforts in East Timor, the Solomon Islands, and various locations in the Middle East and Africa. In the early 2000s the ADF also sent hundreds of training, logistics, and support personnel to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Foreign Affairs

Australia was a founding member of the United Nations and has served various terms on its Security Council. It was also one of four founding members of the (formerly British) Commonwealth. It has been a partner in the ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand, and United States) Treaty since 1952. Australia has been a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since 1971. The country also participates in the Colombo Plan, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, and the Pacific Islands Forum. Australia ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1973 and the Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982. Australia’s recent economic and political disputes have included disagreements with East Timor and Indonesia over maritime boundaries because of petroleum reserves beneath the ocean floor.

The Australian government distributes foreign aid through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Much of the aid is directed to Australia’s neighbors in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Among the major recipients are Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, and East Timor. Australia focuses its aid program on developing countries of the Asia-Pacific region both for humanitarian reasons and to promote its own national interests. For example, aid that boosts a neighboring country’s economy improves the standard of living in that country while also benefiting Australia by opening up new business and trade opportunities. Australia also provides significant aid to a number of more-distant countries. These have included Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in South Asia as well as various African and Middle Eastern nations.

As with most countries, Australia has a network of spying and foreign intelligence organizations. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) gathers intelligence overseas and conducts counterintelligence operations. The Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO) analyzes images taken by satellites, drones, and other means. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) is responsible for the electronic interception of intelligence.

History

Australia’s written history extends only a few centuries into the past, from the time of initial European contact. However, the ancestors of Australian Aboriginal peoples first arrived tens of thousands of years ago and developed a rich legacy of complex oral histories. They told (and tell) of spiritual accounts of the creation of the world, of ancestral heroes, and of religious connections to the landscape. Although there is not enough space in this article to discuss these oral histories in depth, it is important to acknowledge that the history of Australia can be told in many ways. For example, it can be told from the differing perspectives of Aboriginal and European historians, as well as through the evidence from Western science. This history section begins by making use of evidence from archaeological excavations at Aboriginal sites; for more recent events, it relies heavily on written histories. (See alsoexploration of Australia and the Pacific Islands.)

Indigenous Exploration and Settlement

Aboriginal Dreaming stories tell that spirit beings created the Aboriginal peoples along with the landforms and places that now make up Australia. By contrast, scientists using radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating techniques believe that the ancestors of the Aboriginal peoples canoed to Australia from Southeast Asia some 40,000 to 60,000 years before the present, when sea levels were lower. They had settled most of Australia and Tasmania by 30,000 years ago. At that time, most of the continent was wet and green. They could depend on a huge variety of foods, including meat from the giant mammals that roamed the forests and grasslands.

Between 22,000 and 18,000 years ago, however, conditions were colder and drier. Aboriginal peoples probably abandoned the center of the continent as the desert core expanded, and sand dunes covered parts of Victoria and Tasmania. It is likely that various Aboriginal groups also adapted to the changing environment by altering key aspects of their culture, including social networks, trade, art, and new technologies. They were using curved throwing sticks called boomerangs and barbed spears more than 10,000 years ago.

The last Ice Age ended roughly 10,000 years ago. The waters around Australia slowly rose hundreds of feet over a period of several centuries. Water eventually separated mainland Australia from New Guinea and Tasmania. Afterward the Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania lived in complete isolation. However, maritime trade continued between New Guineans and the inhabitants of the Torres Strait Islands, just north of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula. Aboriginal peoples reoccupied central Australia as conditions there improved. However, most of the continent’s larger animals had died off by this time, whether as a result of the climate changes, overhunting (by the successful Aboriginal peoples), or some combination of factors.

Either Aboriginal peoples or groups trading with them brought the dingo, a type of wild dog, to Australia about 3,000–5,000 years ago. About the same time, Aboriginal groups began to use small, flaked stone tools. Within the past 1,500–3,000 years, their population seems to have increased as they exploited new lands and established far-ranging trade networks.

Joseph Lycett, National Library of Australia, nla.obj-138501179

Aboriginal peoples in those days were hunter-gatherers who lived a partly nomadic lifestyle. They moved from place to place within their traditional territory to ensure a steady food supply. They typically built temporary shelters from bark and brush (called gunyahs or mia-mias). Some groups who lived close to water and abundant food sources built more-permanent shelters that they used for months at a time. Different peoples had different kinds of hunting weapons, including nonreturning boomerangs, specialized spears, and woomeras, or hooked spear-throwers. They also used fire on the grasslands to drive game animals in their direction. To fish, they used string nets, stone traps, and tined spears.

A large percentage of the Aboriginal diet depended on the use of digging sticks to supply yams, witchetty grubs, and honey ants. Edible native plants included epacrids (a family of small trees and shrubs), geebungs, and lillypilly. Women, as highly respected members of society, were often responsible for food-gathering activities. Aboriginal peoples respected and protected the land, using natural resources in a sustainable way to ensure their existence for generations to come. (See alsoIndigenous Australians and the environment.)

Courtesy of AIATSIS (collection item no. 73746)

Two groups of seafarers and explorers began trading with northern Australia hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of years ago. Melanesians (mainly Papuans) crossed the Torres Strait in the northeast. They traded from their dugout canoes all along the Cape York Peninsula. The Melanesians brought with them fishing equipment, bows and arrows, drums, and other items. From Indonesia in the northwest, fleets of the Macassans (including Makassarese, Buginese, and other peoples) arrived to harvest trepang (sea cucumber). They also traded tobacco, iron, and glass to Aboriginal peoples of the coast. These visits were recorded in Aboriginal art, ceremonies, and songlines.

There is no way to know precisely how many Aboriginal people inhabited the continent before the arrival of Europeans. Most scholars have estimated that the population was between 300,000 and 750,000 people, and some suggest that the population was as high as 1,000,000. Between neighboring groups, territorial boundaries were known and respected without recourse to fences or permanent housing. As far as is known, wars over property were therefore unnecessary. In addition, relationships between family members and clans were of major importance. Thousands of people would travel hundreds of miles to participate in ceremonial gatherings with distant relatives.

The Torres Strait Islander peoples have inhabited their homeland for at least 2,500 years. They are of Melanesian descent. Traditionally, Torres Strait Islander peoples were seafarers who relied on fishing and trade with other islands and villages along the south coast of Papua New Guinea. Their economy was based on fishing and cultivating private gardens. They traded items such as feathers, turtle shells, pearl shells, tools, and canoes.

Like the Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islander peoples had a close connection with their traditional lands (Country) and waterways and with nature. Torres Strait Islander culture and spirituality were closely linked to the stars and the stories of Tagai, a great fisherman and spirit being whom the Torres Strait Islander peoples believe created the world. Tagai is represented by a constellation of stars in the southern sky. Torres Strait Islander law, customs, and practices were shaped by the Tagai stories. The Torres Strait Islander peoples’ deep knowledge of the stars and sea provided them with valuable information regarding changes in the seasons and when to plant gardens and hunt for turtles or the dugong. This knowledge also helped them navigate the seas.

First Contact with Europeans

National Library of Australia

For several centuries, Europeans had hypothesized that the landmasses of Europe and Asia might be counterbalanced by land in the Southern Hemisphere. They thought that this balance of landmasses kept Earth spinning at an even rate. Eventually Europeans sent navigators to find the Terra Australis Incognita (meaning “Unknown Southern Continent”) that they imagined. By 1509 Portuguese and Spanish navigators had found an ocean route around Africa to India and the Spice Islands (the Moluccas). European explorers then “discovered” other islands north of Australia. These islands included New Guinea by 1526 and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) by 1606.

Robert Ingpen, National Library of Australia, nla.obj-138210565

The Dutch vessel Duyfken, under master Willem Janszoon (also spelled Jansz), made the first European sighting of Australia in 1606 in the Gulf of Carpentaria. From bases on Batavia (now named Jakarta) on the island of Java, the Dutch sought “new” lands and trading partners throughout the East Indies (now Indonesia). Sailing ships bound for Batavia soon found that they could run east from the Cape of Good Hope with the brisk Indian Ocean westerlies (winds coming from the west). They would then cut north at the last possible moment. But not all turned north in time. Dirck Hartog, Frederik de Houtman, and other Dutch navigators thus “discovered” the wreck-littered western coast of Australia between 1616 and 1628.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In 1642–43 Abel Tasman sailed for the Dutch East India Company. He traveled eastward across the Indian Ocean at latitude 50° S. Shifting course to avoid bad weather, he arrived at the stormy west coast of Tasmania. Tasman named the island Van Diemen’s Land after the governor-general in Batavia. He then went eastward and charted New Zealand.

National Library of Australia, nla.obj-145314525

Ann Ronan Pictures/Heritage Image/age fotostock

Navigators long avoided the better-endowed east coast. They were fearful that the prevailing westerly winds would not blow on the eastern, lee side of the continent. James Cook charted the east coast in 1770. He quickly learned of the hazards of the Great Barrier Reef and strove to avoid puncturing his ship’s hull on it. Cook was arguably the greatest European explorer of his time, because of his navigational skill and his ability to keep his crew healthy. He also seems to have had honorable, largely peaceful interactions with Aboriginal groups. However, some Australians now decry Cook as the harbinger of doom for the Indigenous peoples.

European contact with Aboriginal groups was a painful and tragic tale of incomprehension and rapacity. Many European explorers reported contact with hostile “natives.” However, blame for the violent welcomes could often be placed on Europeans. Many of the Europeans believed that it was their right to take prisoners, slaves, and treasure whenever they desired. The earliest British settlers did not recognize Aboriginal rights to the land. They instead reported that the continent was terra nullius—a land unoccupied and unclaimed by prior inhabitants. They saw Aboriginal peoples as uncivilized relics of the Stone Age lacking agriculture, permanent habitations, written languages, and the use of metal.

Many Aboriginal groups were physically or culturally exterminated, uprooted from land which held for them sacred, ceremonial, or hunting significance. The Europeans employed massacres, food poisoning, rape, and punitive expeditions. European diseases also took a heavy toll because the Aboriginal peoples had no immunity to them. Meanwhile, the settlers cleared large areas of land for farming, destroying the habitats of native plants and animals that Aboriginal peoples relied on for food. In addition, some of the animals that the Europeans brought with them escaped and multiplied in wild herds. The animals further damaged the natural ecosystems that Indigenous Australians had sustained for many generations before.

George Hamilton, State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library, V/89

Harry Frochter

Some Aboriginal peoples initially welcomed the new arrivals. They even believed, on occasion, that the light-skinned invaders were the returned ghosts of their ancestors. But in most areas Aboriginal groups responded to the invaders by fighting vicious guerrilla wars. White farmers and police responded with unmatched savagery and cruelty. They sometimes slaughtered Aboriginal men, women, and children in response to Aboriginal attacks or raids on sheep and cattle. Among the most notorious events were the Myall Creek Massacre in New South Wales and the Pinjarra Massacre in Western Australia. Eventually the settlers even set Aboriginal people against each other, ordering their newly trained and equipped Native Police to terrorize populations on the fringes of European settlements. They committed several atrocities, but the Europeans and their police often believed that they were only “defending” innocent people—and civilization itself—in a strange land.

European contact also brought great disruption and distress to the Torres Strait Islander peoples. Europeans began settling in the area in the 1860s. Soon, large quantities of pearl shells were discovered in the Torres Strait region. This led to the establishment of the pearling industry, which attracted many more foreigners. Pearlers of European descent forced Torres Strait Islander people to gather pearls in dangerous—and often deadly—conditions. Sea-cucumber fishing also drew many outsiders and led to abuse of Torres Strait Islander people. To control the lawlessness of the region and to regulate the marine industries, the colonial government of Queensland annexed the islands in the 1870s. Restrictive laws introduced by the government denied Torres Strait Islander peoples their land rights and freedom for many decades.

The arrival of Christian missionaries had a profound impact on the Torres Strait Islander peoples’ way of life. In the late 19th century, Christianity was widely adopted throughout the Torres Strait Islander communities. Torres Strait Islander peoples are still mainly Christian today. (See alsoIndigenous and European contact in Australia.)

A New British Penal Colony

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (a9333001)

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Captain James Cook’s first landfall in 1770 had been named Botany Bay to celebrate the large number of unfamiliar plants found there. The bay was recommended as suitable for a British penal (prison) settlement. For that reason the commander Arthur Phillip led the First Fleet to Australia from Portsmouth, England, in 1787. Phillip was the first governor-designate of New South Wales. The 11 ships set out with a complement of 443 seamen, 586 male and 192 female convicts, 211 marines, and officials, wives, and children. They arrived 250 days later, minus those who had died en route.

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (a128112)

Finding Botany Bay too exposed and lacking drinking water, Phillip investigated the next inlet north. There he “had the satisfaction of finding the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security.” It was Sydney Harbour. He selected a deepwater cove with a freshwater stream and named it Sydney Cove. He officially started the settlement on January 26, 1788, which is now celebrated as Australia Day.

The penal colony at Sydney was initially unable to feed itself. The people often lived on starvation rations. The colony offered only the most dismal prospects for economic development. For the first 30 years, its tiny population occupied an economic backwater as remote from the markets, finance, and technology of Europe as any place on Earth. But settlers finally managed to cross the Blue Mountains (an encircling knot of sandstone canyons) after 1813. Beyond the Blue Mountains they discovered the fertile inland plains—a vast area suitable for grazing livestock. Large-scale agricultural export trade then became possible. Stockmen drove their sheep and cattle inland, leaving behind a brutalized penal colony.

Exile to overseas convict settlements—the so-called “transportation” system—was a British punishment for more than 200 crimes. Conditions belowdecks on convict ships were appalling until surgeon-superintendents were assigned to all voyages after 1815. Once in Australia, prisoners found themselves 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers) from their home country, to which most could never hope to return. Of all the convicts transported until 1868, when the system ended, 137,000 were males. They were mostly young and poor men from the industrial cities, and often thieves. Some 25,000 exiles were females. Not more than 1,000 were political prisoners, some 600 of them from Ireland. Another 4,000 Irish were transported for rebellious “land agitation.” For the first few decades, convicts outnumbered free settlers in New South Wales. Satellite penal stations were established, among them Port Arthur (in Tasmania), Norfolk Island, and Moreton Bay (now Brisbane).

Clergy in Britain eventually began questioning the “transportation” policy. They thought it might not be effective as a deterrent—that is, in preventing people from committing future crimes. They also wondered if, as a punishment, it might fail to reform criminals. In Australia the growing proportion of free settlers resented the stereotyping of all Australians as convicts, or the “convict stain.” The free colonists also feared competition from cheap labor. Only the wealthier rural landholders wanted to prolong “transportation.” They benefited from this system, which placed many convicts in private service. With good conduct the convicts could obtain a “ticket of leave” entitling them to work for wages, or even a conditional pardon—the condition being that they never return to Britain. Only about 15 percent of convicts were sentenced to chain gangs or actual prisons.

Many escaped convicts, called bolters, became bushrangers, the Australian counterparts of Europe’s 19th-century highwaymen or the outlaws of the American West. Their crimes included stock thefts (cattle rustling), robbery of banks and mail coaches, and murder of policemen. Many bushrangers in New South Wales and Victoria roamed in well-organized gangs, often with the support of local residents. The most hardened criminals were sent to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), at Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour. That is how many bushrangers became known as Vandemonians.

Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Bushrangers personified the antiauthoritarian aspects of the Australian character and the comradeship of the bush. They also became a symbol of the transplanted hatred of Irish Catholics for English Protestants and of the rivalry between immigrants and the native-born. They symbolized, too, the disorderliness of settlement itself, for all its rules and regulations. Bushrangers thus became part of Australian folklore. Among the most notorious were Jack Donohoe (the original “wild colonial boy”), Captain Thunderbolt, Mad Dog Morgan, Ben Hall, and the armor-clad Ned Kelly. Kelly’s exploits have since been portrayed by several Australian artists and writers, notably in a series of paintings by Sidney Nolan and a novel by Peter Carey.

Inland Conquest and Colonization

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The map of inland Australia—as seen from a European perspective—was gradually and arduously compiled by the explorers who crossed its length and breadth between 1815 and 1939. White settlers who followed them pushed the pioneering frontier as far as they could into the arid center and the tropical north, first from the southeast and then from the southwest. Explorer John Oxley found only marshes but hoped they were the edges of a vast inland sea. That vision of a well-watered interior led other explorers astray. For example, Charles Sturt traced the Murray River to its outlet, but he later went half-blind in the blazing heat of the Simpson Desert.

The Granger Collection, New York

Others forged overland links between the coastal ports. In 1824 Hamilton Hume and William Hovell were the first to traverse the 540 miles (870 kilometers) between what are now the cities of Sydney and Melbourne. In 1840 Edward John Eyre set out to find a land route between the colonies of South Australia and Western Australia. After heading north from Adelaide, he traveled west across the Nullarbor Plain and reached Albany in mid-1841. Ludwig Leichhardt discovered a route across reliable rivers from Brisbane to Darwin in 1844–45. He vanished without a trace on a second expedition. And while all these European adventures were being conducted, Aboriginal trade routes and connections between clans were being severely disrupted, even destroyed in some places.

The Granger Collection, New York

The race to cross the continent from south to north pitted Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills against John McDouall Stuart. Burke and Wills left from Victoria, while Stuart started in South Australia. Burke and Wills reached the Gulf of Carpentaria first, but they died of starvation on the return journey. Stuart crossed the very center of the continent to reach Darwin.

Governors were generous in granting land to free settlers, marines, military officers, and freed convicts. Actual sales of land began in 1825, but many stockmen became wealthy by taking over unsold land as squatters. So uncontrolled was the spread of settlement inland that the government drew an artificial cordon around an area surrounding Sydney called the Nineteen Counties. Settlers were forbidden to trespass outside that area. By 1836 this unworkable arrangement had to be abandoned. Grazing rights were permitted in these remote squatting districts for an annual fee of 10 pounds sterling. However, these land grants and sales to Europeans were simultaneously land robberies from Aboriginal peoples.

Wool and Gold

State Library of New South Wales (a2408002)

Photography by Kerry and Co. Tyrrell Collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences

The economy of Australia developed around two key activities: agriculture and mining. The most valuable agricultural product was wool. By the 1830s, settlers had discovered that Australia, with its vast fertile plains in the east, was well suited for producing fine wool. The most notable among the founders of Australia’s wool industry was John Macarthur. He set up a grazing estate in New South Wales and studied the wool market in England. Macarthur’s estate became the dominant force in Australia’s wool trade. He established the practice of importing Merino sheep, which would become the basis of the industry. The export of wool to Europe helped fuel the growth of Australia’s economy as a whole.

The first significant mineral discovery was that of copper in South Australia (1842 and 1845). Much more remarkable, however, were a series of gold discoveries made from 1851 onward, first in east-central New South Wales and then throughout Victoria. The gold rushes that followed these discoveries had profound and far-reaching impacts on Australian development. The colonial governors had suppressed reports of gold discoveries between 1823 and 1844 for fear of rampant disorder. They reversed this policy when the great California Gold Rush of 1848 lured many Australians to the United States.

The first officially acknowledged gold discovery was that by Edward Hargraves in 1851 at Ophir. Other finds attracted such an influx of miners into New South Wales that Victorians, already suffering from a labor shortage, were galvanized into offering a reward for the first discovery of payable gold in that state. It was won by James Esmond at Clunes. Much richer finds were made later in 1851 at Castlemaine, Bendigo, and Ballarat—which at the time boasted the richest alluvial goldfield ever discovered.

Victoria’s richer goldfields were also more compact and accessible than those of the other eastern states. During the 1850s, Victoria produced 87 percent of the total Australian gold and 35 percent of world production. Its population boomed from 97,000 to 539,000, an increase larger than that of the entire previous population of Australia. Victoria became the most populous colony, and “marvelous Melbourne” the continent’s largest city.

The gold rushes of the 1850s tripled Australia’s population. They also created a demand for suffrage (voting rights) and empowered the cities to challenge what had previously been a rural monopoly in capital and government. Gold also cast aside the “convict stain” and pumped wealth into a diversifying economy. The economy entered a long boom from 1860 to 1890.

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (Call no. SSV2B/Ball/7. Dgital order no. a928052)

Gold also brought social and political strife to some areas. Grievances over the licensing of mining claims gave rise to violence at Ballarat. There, rebellious miners built a fortification called the Eureka Stockade in 1854. The police and the miners, led by Peter Lalor, traded deadly shots. After the incident, the government redressed most of the miners’ grievances. These rebels are sentimentally credited with the first call for an Australian democracy.

National Museum of Australia

In addition, some European-descended settlers began to resist the flow of gold-induced immigration, particularly when Chinese miners began to arrive in Australia in 1853. By 1858 the Chinese constituted one-fifth of the mining population of Victoria and 11 percent of its total population. Racially motivated riots broke out. Restrictions were placed on Chinese immigration in Victoria (1855), South Australia (1857), and New South Wales (1861). These were the ripening seeds of the White Australia Policy.

Other gold rushes helped populate north Queensland, at Rockhampton (1858), Gympie (1867), Charters Towers (1872), and Mount Morgan, the “mountain of gold” (1882). But many ghost towns and “moon” landscapes of mine tailings were created as deposits were exhausted. Victorian production had slumped by the 1890s. Then, in Western Australia, Paddy Hannan picked up what he thought was a stone to throw at a crow, only to discover that it was a gold nugget. Thus began the 1893 rush to Coolgardie and the genesis of the fabled Golden Mile at nearby Kalgoorlie. The area’s mines declined in the early 20th century. However, their revival in the 1980s helped make Australia one of the world’s leading producers of gold today.

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution—the transition from mostly agricultural economies to those dominated by machine-based manufacturing—began in Britain in the late 18th century. From there it spread to other parts of the world. The Industrial Revolution had a strong impact on the Australian economy in the 19th century. The technology that originated in Britain would enable Australians to improve the productivity of their industries. It also allowed them to deal with the vast distances between their colonies and to ease the export of goods from their remote continent.

The driving force behind new Australian inventions in the 19th century was the steam engine. Its potential to increase Australia’s productivity was recognized by early colonists. John Dickson, an engineer, had manufactured steam engines in London before emigrating to Sydney in 1813. There, using an engine he brought with him, he built Australia’s first steam-powered flour mill.

Steam power played a valuable role during the gold rushes of the 1850s. After miners exhausted the supplies of gold near the surface, gold became much more difficult to reach. Miners who had come from Britain used the knowledge they had acquired back home to introduce steam-powered machinery for mining gold that was deep underground. One such device was the steam pump, which was used to remove water from deep mines.

Photography by Kerry and Co. Tyrrell Collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences

Agriculture also benefited from advances in technology. Before the Industrial Revolution, farmwork was done almost entirely by manual labor, with the aid of horses and bulls. New inventions made during the 1800s began to reduce the burden on laborers while also increasing productivity. In 1843 a horse-drawn machine for harvesting wheat was introduced in South Australia. The invention is generally attributed to John Ridley, though John Wrathall Bull designed a similar machine around the same time. Another invention to come out of South Australia was the stump-jump plow. It was introduced in the 1870s by the brothers Richard Bowyer Smith and Clarence Herbert Smith. This new type of plow was able to glide over tree stumps and rocks rather than get stuck on them. By making it much easier to cultivate cleared scrublands, the stump-jump plow greatly expanded the land available for planting crops.The Australian wool industry—by then the world’s largest—was revolutionized by the replacement of manual clipping tools by a sheep-shearing machine in 1887. Invented by Frederick Wolseley, the steam-powered shearing machine led to a rapid increase in wool production.

The technology of the Industrial Revolution also transformed transportation in Australia. These improvements were crucial to economic growth because farmers needed efficient and affordable ways to ship their products across vast distances both within Australia and overseas. The first steam-powered ships in Australia were launched in Sydney in 1831. In 1853 paddle steamers navigated the Murray River for the first time. Over the next 60 years, about 300 paddle steamers operated on the Murray-Darling river system. The ships provided access to inland farming regions and cattle and sheep stations of southeastern Australia. River transport also encouraged the expansion of settlements by carrying passengers and supplies to previously isolated areas.

At the same time that river transport was expanding, Australia experienced a railroad boom. The first railway in Australia was opened in Victoria in 1854. From then on, construction proceeded remarkably quickly, especially in the 1880s. Between 1875 and 1891 the total track length rose from 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) to more than 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers). Tracks reached as far as 500 miles (800 kilometers) inland. By then, railroads had replaced steamships as the primary means of transporting goods within Australia. They boosted agricultural industries, especially wheat production, by giving farmers a more efficient way to move their products to cities and to the coast for export. The railways also provided a much faster means of overland passenger travel, which until then had depended on horse-drawn vehicles. Towns sprang up and prospered around the railway lines.

The development of oceangoing steamships encouraged immigration to Australia as well as international trade. Speedy clipper ships cut the length of the journey from Australia to England almost in half. The opening of the Suez Canal (between the Mediterranean and Red seas) in 1869 also dramatically reduced the time it took for a ship to sail between Europe and Australia. The clipper called the SS Great Britain, the largest ship in the world at the time, carried more than 15,000 passengers between England and Australia from 1852 to 1876. In the 1880s, clipper ships began to be fitted with refrigeration machines. Australia had been exporting canned meat since 1847; now it could ship perishable meat as well. By the early 1900s Australia had emerged as one of the world’s major food exporters.

Communications expanded at an unprecedented pace during this period. By the 1850s there were post offices in most Australian towns. Telegraphy became widespread in the 1860s. The completion of the Overland Telegraph Line in 1870–72 was a remarkable feat. It was a line some 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) long that ran across the deserts from Adelaide to Darwin and then underwater as cable to the island of Java, which was already linked to Europe. Telephone exchanges were established in the major cities during the 1870s.

Some of the new links with the rest of the globe brought tragedy rather than prosperity, however. In the 1800s and early 1900s, Australia saw the arrival of pandemics of measles, smallpox, Asian flu, and bubonic plague. Quarantine regulations were put in place to protect both agriculture and human health. In addition, Australia was affected by a global economic depression in the 1890s.

Federation and Independence

In the second half of the 19th century, some Australian politicians raised the possibility of uniting the colonies into one country. This idea is called federation. Australians feared invasion from the north by Europeans or Asians or both, and one motive for federation was the need for a united defense. Another motive was that a united Australia would be able to restrict immigration from Asia more effectively. Advocates also argued that federation would encourage free trade and thereby improve the Australian economy.

State Library of New South Wales

The federation movement received a boost in 1889 with a famous speech delivered by Henry Parkes, the premier of New South Wales. A longtime advocate of federation, Parkes urged the colonies to create “a great national government for all Australia.” The speech, delivered in the town of Tenterfield, became known as the Tenterfield Oration. Parkes is remembered as the Father of Federation.

In 1891 Parkes led the National Australasian Convention in Sydney. Each of the colonies, along with New Zealand, sent representatives to the convention. The convention drafted a national constitution. The document was inspired by the federal system of government adopted by the founders of the United States, who had also had the task of uniting colonies into a single country. It laid out a federal system in which a national parliament shared power with state parliaments. Though the convention approved the draft constitution, the colonial parliaments were less enthusiastic. While they dealt with an economic depression, they put the idea of federation aside.

Vincent Kelly/National Library of Australia (nla.pic-an23488021)

Among the Australian people, however, support for federation was growing. Federation leagues were formed in most colonies, and in 1893 they gathered for a landmark conference in the New South Wales town of Corowa. The key figure at the Corowa Conference was John Quick, a legislator from Victoria who proposed that Australian citizens be allowed to elect representatives to a second constitutional convention. The draft constitution created at the convention would then be subject to approval by voters in a series of referendums.

Quick’s plan was adopted by a majority of the Australian colonies. In 1897–98 the second constitutional convention was held. All of the colonies except Queensland sent representatives to the convention, which approved a draft constitution in March 1898. Voters in Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia soon approved the document. However, those in New South Wales rejected it. Queensland and Western Australia did not hold referendums at all. After the colonial leaders met to revise the constitution, every colony except Western Australia held new referendums in 1899. This time the constitution was approved. The British Parliament passed the Constitution Act in 1900. Soon after, Western Australia finally voted in favor of federation.

The Commonwealth of Australia officially came into existence on January 1, 1901. The six colonies then became six states. Interstate customs barriers and tariffs fell, and a phase of integration and economic growth began. The federal government began to plan the development of a national capital at Canberra. In the states, the constitutions, legislatures, and laws continued to operate as before, though federal laws now took precedence. The new country’s population included about 3.8 million Australians of European ancestry and an unknown, or at least uncounted, number of Aboriginal people.

Early Economic and Social Policies

Australia’s government initially protected local industries from competition with foreign competitors. This economic strategy is now called import substitution industrialization. The government carried out this “protection” mainly by using high tariff barriers (taxes on imports) to raise the prices of foreign-produced goods. This encouraged Australians to buy locally manufactured goods instead.

Courtesy of the Australian Information Service

The government sought to use tariffs not only to protect Australian industries but also to benefit workers. The early 1900s were a time of disputes between business owners and their employees, who demanded better pay and safer working conditions. Australians generally believed that workers should share in the country’s growing prosperity in the form of better living standards. Under the Australian constitution, the government did not have the power to regulate wages or working conditions. In 1906, however, the government of Prime Minister Alfred Deakin tried to influence wages indirectly by passing a tax on goods manufactured in Australia. The government exempted companies that paid their workers “fair and reasonable” wages.

The tax passed by Deakin’s government became the subject of a landmark court case in 1907. Hugh Victor McKay, whose Sunshine Harvester Works produced a hugely successful machine for harvesting grain, challenged the tax by applying for an exemption. The case was heard by Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, president of the government’s Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. Higgins listened to testimony from both workers and their wives in determining fair pay for those supporting a family. He ruled that a fair wage for an unskilled worker was seven shillings a day—considerably higher than what Sunshine Harvester Works was paying. McKay appealed the ruling, and the High Court ruled in 1908 that the Harvester judgment was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the ruling was a milestone in Australian labor law because it introduced the idea that businesses should consider not only profit but also the needs of their employees. The Harvester judgment became the basis of Australia’s minimum wage system.

Other new laws extended social services. In 1908 Parliament passed the Invalid and Old-Age Pensions Act. Under the act, weekly payments were made to elderly and disabled Australians who met certain income and residency requirements. In 1912 the government introduced a maternity allowance act. It provided a onetime payment to women who gave birth, to cover medical care for themselves and their babies.

Indigenous Australians were not able to receive any of those payments, however. Asians and Pacific islanders were likewise ineligible to receive those government benefits. Their exclusion reflected the strong anti-immigrant sentiment of the time. Parliament had already demonstrated the government’s goal of maintaining Australia’s British heritage by passing the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901. The act effectively stopped all non-European immigration into the country. It was the hallmark of the White Australia Policy, which would remain in force until the mid-20th century.

World War I and Gallipoli

The newly created Commonwealth of Australia remained a staunchly loyal ally of the British Empire. After Britain declared war against Germany on August 4, 1914, Australia quickly formed the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), an expeditionary army of 20,000 men. New Zealand soldiers joined the AIF to form the ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps).

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In April 1915 the ANZACs were shipped to the Dardanelles, Turkey’s narrow strait between the Mediterranean and Black seas, near Istanbul. The plan was to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, which was an ally of Germany’s. However, the date of the ANZAC’s dawn landing, April 25, is still remembered solemnly as Anzac Day because of the eight months of slaughter that it initiated. The Turks were prepared, entrenched, and determined to withstand the invasion. By the time the British and ANZAC forces withdrew, they had suffered heavy casualties. More than 8,700 Australians died. Despite the bloodiness and futility of the campaign, the ANZAC survivors came home as heroes. Military recruitment boomed amidst waves of sympathetic patriotism.

Image Asset Managemen/World History Archive/age fotostock

Of the more than 330,000 Australians who served in World War I, more than 60,000 died, including many thousands in battles near Ypres, Belgium. Australians suffered the highest ratio of deaths to total national population of any country in the British Commonwealth. In addition, the deadly flu pandemic of 1918 arrived on Australian shores, partly because of the troop massing and movements associated with the war.

World War I boosted Australians’ sense of nationalism. It also began a tradition of fighting in foreign wars in the expectation that grateful allies would in turn defend Australia. However, the war left the Australian government with a massive foreign debt. (For a detailed account of Australia’s involvement in the war, seeAustralia in World War I.)

Between the Wars

Courtesy of the Australian Information Service

Australia became increasingly connected to Europe and North America. The first direct flight from England reached Australia in 1919. Charles Edward Kingsford Smith later piloted the first flights across Australia (from Melbourne to Perth) and across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand.

Many economic changes took place after World War I. Australians built more factories and unionized more factory workers. Broken Hill, the “Silver City,” was built on the world’s richest lode of lead and zinc. Its labor unionists created the militant Barrier Industrial Council. Its members walked out on strike for 18 months in 1919–20 until they won major concessions. Socialist trade unions fought for benefits for injured workers and limits to the length of the workday. Their successes angered right-wing, paramilitary reactionaries, who established the Who’s for Australia League in 1929 and the New Guard in 1931. The novelist D.H. Lawrence anticipated their extremism in Kangaroo (1923).

Railway construction steadily carried the agricultural frontier inland, peaking in 1941. However, the use of three different rail gauges (widths) of track complicated these efforts. Sprawling port cities were consolidated with the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 and of Brisbane’s Story Bridge in 1940.

Meanwhile, the Aboriginal peoples continued to fare poorly. Brutal frontier violence against them persisted in some places, and their numbers continued to drop. The state governments had begun to move Aboriginal groups to large reserves, typically in isolated arid areas. By 1930 only about 67,000 Aboriginal people remained in Australia.

Australia, like most of the world, was struck by the economic calamity called the Great Depression of the 1930s. Prices for wool and wheat fell until Australian export income was half what it had been in 1928. Australian currency was devalued. By some estimates, unemployment rose to as much as 29 percent. Many Australians suffered from extreme poverty. In New South Wales the state treasury exhausted its reserves and could not pay public servants for two months. The state governments created jobs for the unemployed by starting massive water supply and sewerage projects, building roads, and providing services to rural areas.

Happier economic times returned by the late 1930s. This gave white Australians an additional reason to celebrate their land’s 150th anniversary in 1938. Yet, Aboriginal people observed it as a day of mourning. By World War II the major Australian industries included iron and steel, building products, engineering, electrical goods, clothing, printing, and motor assembly.

World War II

Courtesy Australian War Memorial

Courtesy Australian War Memorial

Australia entered World War II on September 3, 1939, the moment that Britain declared war on Germany and its allies. Australia sent troops to fight in Greece, Crete, Syria, and North Africa, among other places. In Libya the Australian “Rats of Tobruk” withstood a siege for many months until relief arrived. The Royal Australian Air Force made several dangerous raids against Germany.

The British Royal Navy was Australia’s first line of defense. However, the British seemed powerless to stop the Japanese from capturing Singapore and from bombing Darwin—both of which happened in February 1942. Of the 130,000 prisoners taken at Singapore, more than 15,000 were Australian. At Darwin the Japanese sank or damaged 16 ships, destroyed 20 aircraft, and killed 243 people. This was the first assault on Australia since 1788. The Japanese also bombed the northern coastal towns of Broome, Wyndham, Derby, Katherine, Port Hedland, and Townsville. Australians knew that Perth was closer to Singapore than it was to the Royal Australian Navy in Sydney Harbour, but most showed Britain their fervent support.

The Japanese were then in control of virtually all of Southeast Asia and most of the critical Pacific islands. They next set their sights on Port Moresby, the principal town of New Guinea (now in Papua New Guinea). The Japanese also planned to seize the United States base in the Midway Islands. At this point, during the first half of 1942, the tide of combat began to turn against Japan. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, United States and Australian warships defeated Japanese invaders. In New Guinea—at Milne Bay, Rabaul, and along the Kokoda Track—Australians helped repulse the Japanese, hounding their retreat into the Solomon Islands and Borneo. Australia became a major United States base for Pacific operations. By 1943 there were 120,000 United States troops stationed there, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur.

The war brought great demand for Australia’s minerals and industrial products. Many industries were moved inland, away from coastal targets. In addition, Prime Minister John Curtin instituted the rationing of food, gasoline, and some clothing. He curtailed travel and investment and extended conscription (the draft). The volunteer Women’s Land Army boosted food production, and 9,000 women became nurses. Uniform taxation was introduced in 1942. The federal government became, and has remained, the sole levier of income tax. Its Commonwealth Bank became a central bank, and its Treasury Department took over national economic policy.

Courtesy Australian War Memorial

Victory in Europe came in May 1945. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By that time, Australian enlistment had totaled nearly 1 million men and women. Among them there were more than 35,000 war-related deaths. Of the more than 22,000 Australians taken prisoner by the Japanese, more than 8,000 died in captivity. Many of them died from starvation in such camps as Singapore’s Changi or from forced labor on the Burma railroad.

Postwar Developments

About 766,000 immigrants arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1955. Some European-descended Australians reacted to this in discriminatory ways. Meanwhile, others underscored Australian identity and accomplishments rather than the European culture and history that had once been regarded as paramount. Debates emerged regarding the future of Australian society. Would the Australia of the future become a multicultural, multiracial society because of the small but growing number of Asian immigrants? Or would people attempt to resist further ethnic and racial changes?

In the past, Australia’s universities had never offered courses in Australian literature. They had regarded Australian history as a primitive subspecies of British history. After World War II, however, the universities found themselves enthralled by Australian studies programs. Soprano Joan Sutherland, writer Patrick White, publisher Rupert Murdoch, and the country’s sporting heroes and heroines made the world their stage and Australia its spotlight. Such “ethnic” soccer teams as West Adelaide Hellas, Marconi Fairfield (now Marconi Stallions), and Melbourne Croatia (now Melbourne Knights) changed the nature of sporting rivalries. Japanese surpassed French, Italian, and German as the most commonly studied foreign language in Australian schools.

In the realm of international politics, Australia maintained the strong ties that it had forged with the United States during World War II. The two countries established a firm alliance during the Cold War. Australia eagerly signed the ANZUS Treaty with New Zealand and the United States in 1951. Unfortunately, under that treaty Australia committed to an ultimately worthless policy of “forward defense” by sending troops to fight in Korea, Malaysia, and Vietnam from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Australia also joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954 after French Indochina disintegrated. (See alsoVietnam War.)

Courtesy of the Australian Information Service

The Cold War was not only an issue in foreign affairs—it had a major impact on Australia’s domestic politics as well. The event that brought the Cold War into Australian politics is known as the Petrov Affair. Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov were Soviet spies who came to Australia in 1951. They fell out of favor with the Soviet government. however, and in 1954 they defected to Australia. Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies, a strong opponent of communism, named a commission to investigate. Vladimir Petrov’s secret documents implicated staff members of Herbert Vere Evatt, leader of the opposition Labor Party. Evatt accused the Menzies government of forging the documents to damage the Labor Party leading up to the 1954 election. Evatt’s conspiracy theory led anticommunist members of the Labor Party to break away and form the Democratic Labor Party. The split drastically weakened the Labor Party, which would not regain power until 1972.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

During the 1950s and ’60s Britain, with the approval of the Australian government, used Australia as the site of a nuclear testing program. The program included 12 detonations of nuclear weapons along with hundreds of other experiments involving weapon components. The British tested their first atomic bomb at the Montebello Islands, off the coast of Western Australia, in 1952. They went on to detonate two more devices at Montebello and nine in the Outback of South Australia: seven at Maralinga and two at Emu Field. Almost all of the other experiments took place at Maralinga. The testing program ended in 1963, but the Maralinga site in particular remained contaminated long after. Local Aboriginal peoples suffered lung disease and other illnesses that have been attributed to the tests. The British government carried out two ineffective cleanup operations in the 1960s. Conditions improved after a larger cleanup effort in the 1990s, though many continued to believe that the area was unsafe.

Despite the cooperation on nuclear testing, Australia generally shifted away from its 200-year connection with Great Britain during the postwar period. Meanwhile, Britain turned more toward the rest of Europe. Britain later hurt Australian agricultural exports by joining the European Economic Community (the forerunner of the European Union, or EU) in 1973. To symbolize the growing distance from its old mother country, Australia changed its monetary unit to the Australian dollar in 1966. It replaced traditional British pounds, shillings, and pence with easily calculated dollars and cents.

Until the oil crisis that was engineered by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973, the Australian economy boomed. Unemployment remained quite low—below 2 percent of the workforce. A materialistic modern consumer society emerged. Home ownership rose from 50 percent in 1945 to 70 percent by the 1960s.

National Archives of Australia: A1200, L49630

After 1973 Australia’s traditional exports suffered because of serious fluctuations in the prices of basic commodities such as wool, minerals, and foodstuffs. Synthetic substitutes for wool and other raw materials also hurt Australia’s exports. As a result, Australia’s inflation rate rose and economic growth slowed. However, this situation was changed by a mining boom, mainly because of deposits of hematite (iron-ore crystals) in Pilbara. Initially financed by American and British interests, the Pilbara region was developed with new ports, railroads, and highways, and new housing spread across the formerly open landscape. Australia became a leading exporter of iron ore. The huge Pilbara mines at Mount Tom Price, Newman, and Paraburdoo became household words. Mineral exports surpassed those of agricultural products by 1980. Significant economic growth also came from developments in the oil and gas fields of Bass Strait and the desert interior, the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme, and the tourist islands of the Great Barrier Reef.

The decade of 1975–85 brought major economic uncertainties. Oil prices rose, and the commodities markets were erratic. There were two recessions during that period. It was also the heyday of corporate raiders. Unemployment peaked in 1983 at 10 percent. When the traditionally socialist Labor government won federal office in 1983, it startled the business community by deregulating the financial system (exposing it to world market forces and corporate raiding). The government also allowed a 10 percent devaluation of the Australian dollar to offset reverses in the terms of trade. Beginning in the 1980s, Australia followed an international trend toward lower tariffs. In the 1990s it signed onto major agreements as part of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other “free trade” confederations.

Reorientation Toward Asia

Although it remained a firm ally of the United States, after 1980 Australia took a more independent stance internationally. The country began to focus on economic and diplomatic issues affecting the Pacific Rim rather than embracing the old militaristic and white-supremacist attitudes. The pace of modernization quickened, and Australians increasingly viewed themselves within the context of Asia. This shift was also aided by conversion to the metric system by 1981. Between 1983 and 1989, foreign investment in Australia grew, especially from British, American, and Japanese sources. Australia phased out import tariffs on industrial goods. Such government enterprises as Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, Telecom, and Australian Airlines seemed ripe for privatization. Overseas visitors arrived in swelling numbers, up from 23,236 in 1925 to 2.4 million in 1991.

Michael Jensen/National Library of Australia (nla.pic-vn3298879)

Bob Hawke was first elected prime minister in 1983, and he became the first Labor Party leader to serve more than two consecutive terms. He was called the most popular prime minister in Australian history. However, in December 1991 he was undone by a steep recession. The unemployment rate rose to more than 10 percent, and several major banks failed. His party voted him out of the leadership post, and Paul Keating—his former treasurer—succeeded him. The recession would later be seen as part of a worldwide economic downturn.

The sudden end of the Cold War in 1991 accelerated the Australian reorientation toward Asia. This brought new opportunities for profit and jobs. The economies of East Asia, from Japan and South Korea in the north to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore in the south, became dynamos of productivity. They also became vital trading partners for Australia.

Keating cemented relationships with Japan, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. But he played on nationalist sentiment by alienating the British on several issues. These issues included a demand for a new Australian flag and accusations that Britain had failed to defend Commonwealth countries adequately during World War II. Controversy still surrounds the national anthem and flag because of their obvious symbolic attachments to Great Britain. Liberal Party leader John Howard succeeded Keating as prime minister in 1996.

A New Australia

By the end of the 20th century, Australian society had matured to a level that would be almost incomprehensible to the early colonizers. In many ways it had become an Americanized consumer society. The country was under the influence of powerful corporations, and its people were increasingly addicted to electronic media and fast-food restaurants. Yet the state had also developed several welfare programs to protect its citizens. Among these protections were a 40-hour working week since 1939, a pharmaceutical benefits plan since 1950, and a national health plan since 1975. The federal government instituted universal health care with the Medicare program in 1984.

By the late 1900s, Australia was attracting a large amount of international attention. Brisbane was the site of World Expo 88, which drew more than 18 million visitors. Australia’s lavish 200th anniversary celebrations in 1988 were another tourism sensation. However, the anniversary was also marked by demonstrations. Aboriginal peoples protested against past abuses by European colonists and their governments as well as ongoing discrimination in Australian society.

For much of the century, growing numbers of non-Aboriginal Australians, including scholars, politicians, and individual citizens, were concerned with Aboriginal problems. The federal government finally granted Australian citizenship and the right to vote to all Aboriginal people in the 1960s. Many Australians, however, continued to marginalize and condemn Aboriginal peoples—effectively blaming them for their overall high levels of poverty and alcoholism, low levels of education, and other problems. The vexing question of Aboriginal land rights remained unresolved.

Courtesy of AIATSIS (collection item no. N01620_09)

National Archives of Australia: A1200, L31990

State and federal government policies had been designed to assimilate Indigenous Australians into the dominant (white) society. Official policy had included taking Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children—especially those of mixed Indigenous and white ancestry—away from their parents. The children were placed in orphanages and forced to undergo European-style education. These children later became known as the Stolen Generations. The governments enforced these types of policies from 1939 until the 1970s, when they were replaced by a policy of integration marked by tolerance of diversity. Aboriginal communities have gained legal recognition since then. Debates continue, however, regarding reparations for past abuses and compensation for lands that were taken from their ancestors.

In 1992 the High Court issued its famous “Mabo decision.” It ruled that Eddie Mabo and other members of a group of Torres Strait Islander people owned customary title to their land. This established a legal precedent for other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were seeking rights to their traditional lands. Some farmers, mining companies, and business investors objected to the ruling. They argued that they could no longer sign farming contracts, prospect for minerals, or make other vital financial decisions—all because land ownership was now unclear. These groups were joined in their opposition by some politicians. Nevertheless, Australia’s Parliament put the Mabo decision into law in 1993 by passing the Native Title Act. The act opened a new era of Indigenous land-rights claims. It also helped make Aboriginal descent a matter of pride. By the early 21st century, the number of Australians affirming themselves to be Aboriginal was more than a half million.

In 1998 Australia’s Parliament voted to turn the country into a fully independent republic by severing Australia’s last, largely symbolic ties to the British crown. In a public referendum in 1999, however, 55 percent of Australians voted to retain some ceremonial ties with the British monarchy. They also voted to keep the parliamentary system of government rather than changing Australia to a republic headed by a president.

During the early 2000s, Australians faced several environmental concerns. Among them were the thinning of Earth’s protective ozone layer and the conservation of natural resources and parks. Other issues included droughts and threats to coastal areas and vegetation due to global warming, including the risk that rising temperatures could fuel increasingly destructive storms and El Niño events. Australians also faced concerns over race relations and ethnic tolerance. Yet there were great reasons for optimism, too. The economy was strong and diversified. And people were mostly looking to the justice system and political process to resolve grievances (such as the Aboriginal land disputes) rather than turning to extremist violence.

In international affairs, the United States called for assistance in its “war on terrorism”—particularly in the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the controversial invasion of Iraq in 2003. Australia eventually contributed logistics, air transport, ships, and military advisers for both those wars. In addition, Australia continued to provide military and civil personnel to its neighbors. They included the young republic of East Timor (formerly a part of Indonesia), the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea, where corruption and crime were major problems.

Political Developments

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Prime Minister John Howard headed a coalition government of the Liberal and National parties from 1996. He won reelection three times. Howard became known for taking a hard line against illegal immigration. His refusal to allow boat refugees to seek asylum in the country in 2001 proved popular among many Australians. His sending troops to help fight the U.S.-led war in Iraq ultimately proved much less so. Howard also introduced several controversial reforms to labor laws, such as limiting the ability of workers to sue their employers for being unfairly fired.

Parliament of Australia, Department of Parliamentary Services

After more than a decade of conservative government, Australians voted the Labor Party into power in the elections of 2007. Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd became prime minister. Howard lost not only that post but also the seat he had held in Parliament for more than 30 years. The new administration soon began reversing several policies of its predecessor, notably by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and by withdrawing Australia’s combat troops from Iraq. In an attempt to bring about a new “healing of the nation” in its race relations, on February 13, 2008, Rudd made a historic formal apology to the Stolen Generations and other Indigenous Australians for past abuses they had suffered under the Australian government.

During the global economic downturn of 2008–09, Rudd introduced large economic stimulus packages. Australia was one of the few developed countries that managed to avoid entering a recession. Nevertheless, Rudd’s popularity declined rapidly in 2010 owing to policy setbacks. His carbon emissions trading scheme to combat climate change had failed to gain passage. When Rudd withdrew the legislation, which was the centerpiece of his environmental program, some criticized him as being too timid. He also faced vocal opposition from business groups to a large proposed tax on mining.

Michel Euler—Reuters/Landov

In June 2010 Rudd stepped down when his deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, challenged his position as party leader. Gillard became both the Labor Party leader and Australia’s first woman prime minister. Shortly after taking office, Gillard called for a new election, which took place in late August. The results were extremely close, and neither Labor nor the Liberals won an outright majority in the House of Representatives. Labor ultimately secured the backing of several independent and Green members of Parliament, allowing Gillard to form a minority government in early September.

Janie Barrett/AP

Rob Griffith/AP Images

Gillard’s term as prime minister yielded mixed results. She was praised for her handling of the eastern Australia floods in 2010–11, yet she failed to produce major policy successes on immigration and climate change. Gillard did not fare much better as the Labor Party leader. Her term was clouded by Rudd’s numerous unsuccessful challenges to her position. Her tumultuous reign led to a decline in both party and personal popularity. In June 2013 Gillard called for a leadership vote in the Labor Party, and she was defeated by Rudd. Gillard then resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by Rudd. Labor Party infighting, a slowing national economy, and controversy over the Australian government’s immigration policy contributed to Labor’s continuing slippage in public approval. Rudd’s tenure as prime minister lasted only a matter of months. In the general election of September 7, 2013, the Liberal-National coalition, led by Liberal party chief Tony Abbott, was swept to victory.

Office of the Prime Minister of Australia

As prime minister, Abbott instituted several policies that proved to be popular with many Australians. These policies included turning away boats carrying asylum seekers and giving approved refugees only temporary, three-year visas. He also repealed taxes on greenhouse-gas emitters and on profits from iron-ore and coal mining. As his administration went on, however, his other economic policies and his social conservatism drew criticism, and his administration’s approval ratings fell. A party leadership challenge from Malcolm Turnbull in September 2015 resulted in Abbott’s defeat and Turnbull’s rise to prime minister. In the 2016 federal elections, the Liberal-National coalition retained power by a narrow margin, and Turnbull was returned to office.

Turnbull, as a moderate, faced challenges from conservatives within the coalition. One issue that divided the government was same-sex marriage. Turnbull was a strong advocate of legalizing the practice, but many conservatives disagreed. In November 2017 the government held a national poll in which Australians voted 62 percent to 38 percent in favor of legalization. In the following weeks both houses of Parliament approved a bill that made same-sex marriage the law of the land.

Opinion within the ruling coalition was also divided on energy and climate policy. In August 2018, responding to opposition from conservatives, Turnbull scrapped his proposal to set a target for reducing Australia’s carbon emissions. Following that defeat, a weakened Turnbull faced a challenge for leadership of the Liberal Party from Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. Turnbull survived by a vote of 48 to 35, but the Liberal Party held another vote just days later. This time Turnbull was ousted as party leader in favor of Scott Morrison, the country’s treasurer. Morrison was sworn in as Australia’s new prime minister on August 24, 2018.

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